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Discovering New Customer Requirements:

The Key to Defining High-Impact New Products

Jean-Claude Balland and José Campos

(Authors of Capture and Use the Voice of the Customer for Product Development)

Robert G. Cooper, in an extensive analysis of successful and unsuccessful products published in his widely cited book Winning at New Products, has characterized the most important success factor for new products as “A unique, superior, and differentiated product that offers superior value to the customer.” Why is it so difficult? The short answer is that most companies being organized along product lines, naturally force product teams to think “product first,” while defining differentiated, high value products requires thinking “customer first”. What this means in practice is that marketers need to first understand what their target customers value. Your product in itself has no value until a customer considers it to solve a specific problem and achieve specific goals. It is the customer and only the customer that defines value.

Since value is in the mind of the customers, marketers need to become experts at tapping into customers’ minds, and transforming these findings into requirements that product developers can use to create “superior, differentiated, high value” solutions. It’s not easy. Surveys won’t do it. Focus groups won’t do it. No, the product teams must go out and spend time listening, observing, and interacting with representative target customers.

Granted, most marketers faced with defining new products actually go out and visit customers. But, the usual approach goes something like this:

• Call the sales force and ask for customers to visit

• Prepare a questionnaire focused on what features and specifications the customer would like to see in the new product

• Conduct the questionnaire with the customer and take notes as she speaks

• Return to the plant and process customer inputs to a set of features and specifications

• Write product requirements document with this set of customer inputs and hand to product developers for execution

High impact and breakthrough products seldom originate from this approach. Henry Ford has been reported as saying, “If I had asked the customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse." It is indeed easy to understand why. Customers don’t know what’s feasible. They only know what they need to achieve. And at the beginning of the 20th century, they needed a faster way to go from point A to point B at an affordable price. So the lesson from this is: Don’t ask the customer to define your future product. It’s your job. Ask them what they need to achieve (outcomes, benefits, objectives, goals, results, etc.) and what they are willing to accept to achieve these results (cost, pain, constraints, nuisances, effort, troubles, risk, etc.).

Marketers have limited time and budget to carry this type of investigation. That implies that they can only visit a limited number of customers. And, when they are face-to-face with the customer they need to use the time in the most efficient manner.

Maximizing the return on this limited time and budget advocates the need for a disciplined process. This process should focus on two things:

1) selecting what customers are most able to generate representative customer requirements, and

2) maximizing the amount of useful information from the customer (the “voice of the customer”)

Expressed this way, the reader can see that the ad hoc approach presented earlier is far from maximizing the return on the marketer’s time and budget. Several issues can be spotted regarding this approach:

• Is the sales force the best source in choosing who you will visit to get what you want?

• Is a questionnaire the best way to understand what customers value?

• Will you be missing important information by going alone to visit customers?

• Will you be missing important clues by being busy taking notes?

• Are the customers the best able to define your product features and specifications?

• Are "features and specifications" what the product design team needs to generate high value, differentiated products?

The authors have answered a definite NO to all these questions. To maximize the return on the product team’s time, they have developed a unique electronic guide to allow any product development team to efficiently capture customer needs and interpret them to generate a set of well-formulated customer requirements. In addition, since this kind of in-depth customer investigation is not an activity that product development teams engage in several times a year, it is mandatory that any methods and guidance be rapidly applicable. This guide does not only explain what to do, but also HOW to do it. Its claim to fame is “immediate applicability”. To achieve this ambitious goal, it includes a full set of step by step processes, multiple practical tools and templates, and numerous examples.

The Four I’s Master Process: A Disciplined Approach to Efficiently Create Superior, Well-Differentiated, High-Value Products
 

The journey from soliciting customer inputs to actual products is a critical one. Your final product will be based for a large part on the customer needs you gathered in that phase and the customer requirements you extract from them. It is the foundation of the whole edifice. It is the inputs to the product definition and the product development process. If you use QFD (Quality Function Deployment) or derivatives of this methodology, it is the input to the “house of quality”. Like for a building, foundations need to be solid. The ad hoc approach presented earlier does not provide solid foundations.

The Master Process presented herein is build on five solid pillars:

1. Rapid planning and deployment of the customer requirements gathering phase

2. Purposeful selection of customers to interview; the ones best able to generate the information you need

3. Skillful interviewing and observation skills to get the customer to share the maximum amount of information during the limited time you are with her

4. Efficient capture and processing of the hundreds customer needs you will gather

5. Disciplined articulation of customer and product requirements that create opportunities to innovate

This process has four phases: INVESTIGATE, INTERPRET, INNOVATE, and INCORPORATE. The process always includes in-depth interviews and observation of customers in their world as a minimum. The first two phases are dedicated to gathering customer needs, and relevant additional information. This phase ends with the articulation of customer requirements, which will be then used by the product design team to create innovative solutions that create customer value. The last two phases are then dedicated to the creation of customer value. They end with the “final product” that will be implemented.
 

Table 1: The 4xI’s Master Process is a disciplined approach to guide a product team from planning to actual delivery of superior, well-differentiated products that create value for the customer.

Eliciting Customer Requirements
 

The first two phases of the Master Process are critical. As stated earlier, it is the foundation of the whole edifice. The 4xI’s process pays particular attention to these phases so that product teams can arrive at a set of well-articulated customer requirements. Without good customer requirements, the product team does not know what to design. Without good customer requirements, the team cannot know if the product will satisfy customer needs. Without good customer requirements, risks of reworks increase dramatically, so do risks of schedule slips and cost increases. In summary, the cost of generating a good set of customer requirements is minor compared to the costs of starting with bad requirements.

The table below shows the seven steps leading to a well-articulated set of requirements at the end of the first two phases.

Table 2: Seven Steps to Well-Articulated Requirements

Rapid Deployment
 

The first of the five pillars mentioned earlier was “Rapid planning and deployment of the customer requirements gathering phase.” It is one thing to have a disciplined approach — it is a completely different matter to be able to rapidly deploy it. For this reason, the authors have developed the electronic guide with the objective of being practical and immediately applicable.

You can open the guide at any step and simply follow the instructions. Everything you need to do is documented. In addition, tools and templates, many in fillable format are ready for the practitioner to use. Product teams are not usually getting into extensive customer requirements gathering campaigns every six months. So, without support like this guide, the accumulation of expertise could be rather slow. The electronic guide is a canned expertise document that the product team will have handy whenever it needs to start a new campaign.
 

Conclusion
 

A set of good customer and product requirements is the foundation a product team must build if it wants to develop superior, well-differentiated products that create value for the customer. The ad hoc approach used by many product teams fall short of delivering this outcome. In its place the authors have developed and abundantly documented a customer-centric disciplined process that maximizes the return of this fuzzy front-end phase.

Owners of the electronic guide can rapidly plan and implement a complete customer requirements gathering campaign and deliver to product developers and management well-documented and justifiable requirements that go much beyond the usual list of features and specs and build the foundations on which a team can create innovative solutions.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Jean-Claude Balland, Ph.D. is a marketing executive, consultant, keynote speaker, and instructor specializing in technology products and systems, with extensive management experience in Europe, the United States, and Japan. He serves as adjunct professor at Oregon Graduate Institute and Portland State University where he teaches technology marketing and user-centered innovation graduate courses. His consulting services help companies define and position superior products and rapidly deploy strategies that deliver exceptional value to customers and shareholders.

Jean-Claude's services include workshops, coaching, process improvements, and new process development. Clients include Mentor Graphics Corporation, Yokogawa Electric Corp. in Japan, and Tektronix, Inc. He holds a degree in Electronics Engineering from Institut National des Sciences Appliques in Lyons, France, and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Lyons, France.

He is an entertaining speaker with an engaging style that makes his workshops a memorable experience.

José Campos has more than 25 years of experience in new product development, specializing in Concurrent Engineering, Quality Function Deployment (QFD), High Performance Organization, and Concept Engineering.
 

José pioneered the development of practical tools to enable development teams to better obtain and process customer input. These include the Panel of Experts, a tool that enables customers to provide very actionable information for new features, and Obtaining and Using Customer Requirements, an innovative form of a handbook to help product development teams obtain, process and use customer requirements in new products.

Capture and Use the Voice of the Customer for Product Development

© 2008 Jean-Claude Balland and José Campos. All other marks are the property of their respective owners. All rights reserved.