The number one reason startups fail isn't lack of funding. It isn't competition.

It's building something nobody asked for. Founders fall in love with their own vision, spend months or years building exactly what they imagine the market needs, and then watch the market shrug.

What if the single framework that prevents this didn't come from Silicon Valley at all, but from a manufacturing floor?

In Episode 18 of Starting Up, host Jay Sensi opens the GROWING phase of the show with the most powerful tool he ever used: the Voice of the Customer. He traces it back to an unlikely source, the Lean and Six Sigma training he was required to complete as part of Lockheed Martin's operations leadership development program, and explains how a methodology built to eliminate waste on assembly lines became his secret weapon for designing software ...