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.

Recently I read a marketing requirements document (MRD) for a sophisticated new mission critical software product for enterprise customers.

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).

Most people do voice-of-the-customer (VOC) by showing customers the features of the new product they want to make. The customer usually says "sure, it looks fine." There you have it, this describes most "VOC Systems" in action. This is a feature-based approach.

Five-steps to understanding customer wantsand quickly translating them to product definition. Based on our research work with best-practice teams we developed a 5-step voice-of-the-customer (VOC) process for aligning customer requirements (wants) with product requirements (hows) in order to determine what customers value most.

"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.

When people listen to one another many times the listener is hearing their own radio station playing--W.I.I.FM (what’s in it for me FM radio).

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.

In this presentation I’ll discuss a decision modeling concept we’ve developed that is based on voice-of-the-customer prioritization models created with our clients and their customers. We call this “What, Want, How, and How Much.” Many problems can be seen from this simple metric. The order of these are important, which you will see later.

Often product functions or features are confused with customer needs. In our world a customer need (also called "customer requirement") is an attribute that expresses some part of problem a customer is trying to solve. A product feature is specifically how the customer's need will be fulfilled. A product feature is also called a "how."

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.

The Right Product is the one that precisely meets the Right Customer’s product requirements. But determining those requirements and translating them into product specifications is a complex process, and businesses don’t always put in enough effort.

Highly successful companies base their business plans on the market. They study market segments and carefully choose which ones to compete in, looking for the most suitable dominant Tier 1 customer in a particular segment—the Right Customer.