What, Who, Why, and Value?

What, Who, Why, and Value?

There are key decisions that are necessary to be made quickly during the concept stage of new product development. When these decision are not made or are unclear, project schedules drift and fail to converge in time. You end up with the wrong product at the wrong time or in other words, “late and not what customers want.” When you quickly get them right, you end up with the right product at the right time. Drift and confusion at the start of projects have the greatest impact on future product success. We have seen it many times go right and also spectacularly wrong when poorly managed.

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Unmanaged fuzzy-front-end

Unmanaged fuzzy-front-end

What is wanted versus what can be delivered? A failure to reconcile. Rarely are engineering resources involved in the critical step of reconciling what is wanted with what can be delivered. The Marketing (or product) Requirements Document (MRD or PRD) is written and basically "tossed over the wall" to Engineering, who also typically ignores what they are not interested in, or don't want to do, or don't have the resources to do... and at the end of the day the resulting product is a function of what can be done versus what is really needed (by the customer).

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Who influences your product direction decisions?

Who influences your product direction decisions?

"I know what customers want. I've been in this business for a long time. We are forging a new direction and customers don't know what they want until we define it for them... " How many times have you heard declarations like the comments above. Typically, product direction is driven by two types of power; people in leadership positions and/or people who are the declared subject matter "experts." In fact, these are the two primary influences on decision-making in most organizations.

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From target market to product definition using VOC

From target market to product definition using VOC

Voice-of-the-Customer (VOC) process we applied with a client developing a new Greentech product. The product had the potential to serve many market segments and perform many functions. The question for the development team was; "which segment would drive 80% of the functionality requirements and where could they get the fastest and biggest bang for their investment?" The goal was to accelerate time-to-revenue. They essentially had one bullet in their gun and needed to hit the target with the first shot.

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Ask the Customer

Ask the Customer

Based on our research work with best-practice teams we’ve developed a 5-step voice-of-the-customer, or “VOC” process for aligning customer requirements with product requirements in order to determine what customers value most. The customer’s requirements are their “wants” and the product requirements are “how” you will fulfill those wants with your product or service.

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Increase Product Success

Increase Product Success

Increase your new product success rate by finding the root causes of poor performance and translating these into selection criteria to pick better products (to develop). This process also uncovers issues that are causing the wrong products to be defined in the first place. Better failure analysis, i.e. why do some new products miss their targets?, can be translated into better new product selection criteria so that more good ideas get into the development pipeline than bad ones.

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