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Design partner vs customer pilot

Why design partners and customer pilots are different motions.

Customer pilot

Prescribed product. Short clock (ideally one to two months). Written success criteria. Explicit path to a commercial decision.

Design partner

Often three to six months (session-attributed pattern). Discount traded for logos, quotes, and product learning. Valuable — and a different playbook.

Mixing them fails

Open-ended co-build language inside a pilot agreement is how you get endless scope and no PO.

Claims and patterns on this page are paraphrased from practitioner session notes and the Startup Bible pilots page. See Sources.

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