ONE MORE TIME: You’ve Got To Talk With Customers
I was visiting a client of Enthiosys to discuss Agile Software Development practices and during the meeting my client mentioned that her company had recently created a New Product Development / Ideation group. I looked at the wall and noticed an ideation process map and asked if that map was how this group intended to work. She replied yes, that that process map was the current thinking from this group. She detailed the process, which showed several sources of input into the New Product Development group. Among the sources listed included:
- Corporate strategy
- Corporate capabilities
- Competitive assessment
- Analyst research
- New technology
- Core competencies
There were a few more, but I honestly can’t remember what they were because what was missing just hit me like a 2×4 in the chest. Customer. The actual customers of this client were never listed on this chart. Not once. Not in qualitative research. Not in quantitative research. Simply not listed.
When I asked my client about this, she replied something like “Well, this may not be the final version of their process. I think they are planning on talking to customers, but I’m not sure. Customer support is listed as an input into the diagram—that should help, right?”
I told her that yes, soliciting input for New Product Concepts from internal groups such as sales, professional services, and customer support was helpful, but I also told her that I thought it was an egregious mistake to create a New Product Development / Ideation group that doesn’t talk directly with customers.
In the hopes of stating what should be blatlantly obvious, the foundation of innovation is understanding your customers. This includes talking with them.
February 28th, 2007 at 28 Feb 2007
Great posting Luke.
Yesterday afternoon I was called into a meeting to discuss our company’s product road map. The meeting was facilitated by the co-founder of our company. The attendees included our software developer and me, the business development manager.
Five posters were hung on a wall representing different elements of our software such as platform, games, authoring tool, etc. We hung post-it stickies with new feature/function ideas on the posters.
Our CEO will conduct an ABC123 analysis to determine which features and functions provide the highest value for the lowest investment.
After attending several trade shows and talking to prospects and former customers, I’m getting a pretty good sense for what the market wants and communicated what I had learned to our facilitator.
While conducting a needs-analysis with customers and prospects is a critical step in my sales process, a more in-depth and engaging analysis may provide a stronger foundation for innovation.
What’s the best way to solicit new product concepts from a customer and how does one determine what concepts should be developed?
March 1st, 2007 at 01 Mar 2007
Tom – I’m not sure what an ABC123 analysis is—can you describe it further? In terms of making choices about prioritizing market needs, several Innovation Games® can help, notably 20/20 Vision, Prune the Product Tree, and Buy a Feature. These results are, of course, qualitative. If you’re looking for quantitative feature results you’ll want to consider different research techniques.
Product Box, Spider Web, Remember the Future, and Me and My Shadow are all excellent games that can be used to generate product concepts. Product concepts can then be evaluated and ranked on a number of dimensions. Some of the dimensions that Enthiosys has found useful in evaluating product concepts generated by Innovation Games® on client projects include:
– market size/structure
– market characteristics (e.g., is it growing)
– core competencies relative to the development of the product concept
– IP (e.g., do you have a strong patent portfolio?)
– nature/structure of the competitive market
– (others…)
From there, you can choose the product concept with the best ranking for further development / evaluation.
Note that this describes the early phases of a gated New Product Development process. We’ve found integrating Innovation Games®, roadmapping, and Agile Software Development practices into phase gate processes to be a sound way to move quickly and confidently in identifying and selecting appropriate product concepts to move into development.
March 1st, 2007 at 01 Mar 2007
Hi Luke,
Thanks for your response describing the early phases of a gated New Product Development process. It was very useful and I plan to review the games you mentioned. Most importantly, I will try to communicate again the need to talk with customers.
Regarding your question about the ABC123 Process, the process is used to evaluate ideas based on any variable to generate a “Best Ideas” list that contains the best combination of high value and low cost.
1. Relative impact
(ABC scale where A = High Relative Impact, B = Medium Relative Impact, C=Low Relative impact)
2. Relative cost to implement
(123 scale, where 1 = Low Relative cost, 2 = Medium Relative Cost, 3 = High Relative Cost)
My thoughts are that when performing an ABC123 analysis based on internally generated ideas without actually talking to customers, the impact of new features/functions will only be a “best guess.” If customers were asked to generate a ranked list of features/functions based on impact, we’d eliminate the possibility of developing a product road map and investing in areas that are not actually opportunities to improve the current product.
Games are very likely to engage our customers to provide better or more complete ideas and I will recommend that we use games to communicate with our customers.
March 5th, 2007 at 05 Mar 2007
Tom – I understand the ABC123 analysis technique—I just never called it that. Am I too old or too young ?
I think Innovation Games will definitely help you sort through your choices, but keep in mind that you have to balance qualitative and quantitative market research. I agree with Geoffrey Moore (or, he agrees with me) that if serve a market characterized by very small numbers of distinct customers (some B2B/B2P markets) then qualitative research alone is enough. If, however, you serve markets where there are large numbers of distinct customers you may also want to consider quantitative market research to help further fine-tune your prioritization process.
That said, I always recommend starting with some games to ensure that you’re directionally correct.