Customer Driven Innovation Pt. 4
??Travis "Grizzly" Jacobs
Product Development, Innovation, Mechanical Engineering, Creativity, Leadership, Communication
What to design Is More Important Than How To Design It
Where you are headed is more important than how fast you are going.
If you don’t know where you are going any road will get you there.
Understand The Answers To Theses Questions … Customer Focused
Who is your customer?
Who is the end user?
Who is not your customer?
What is the job to be done?
What is the problem to solved?
What are the wants & needs of the customer?
- Do you understand the difference between the two?
- Does the customer understand the difference between the two?
Who are you designing this for?
What is the specific problem you are solving and who are you specifically solving it for?
What does the customer value and what will they pay for?
What does the customer consider non value added?
What does the customer consider waste and excess … what will they not pay for?
What are the problems and challenges the customer faces on a daily basis?
Why is solving this problem important?
- What difference will it make?
- Are solving the right problem?
- Are you getting the right answers to the wrong questions?
When it comes to understanding the customers problems & challenges.
There are two buckets these fit into
- Emotional Understanding
- Logical Understanding
Understand the answers to the following three questions from an emotional & logical perspective.
- Understand what they customer is trying to accomplish ... achieve ... solve
- Understand the problem and why they are trying to solve it
- Understand why it is a problem
Customer & Team Questions To Be answered Collectively
Where is the finish Line?
What does winning look like?
What is the end state?
How do we know when we’re done?
What does good performance look like?
What is a win?
Define the scoreboard?
Talk With The Customer ...
What are they trying to do
Why they are unable to do it
What are the pain points ... how many are there ... where does it hurt
Why is it painful
How long has this been going on
How much pain it's currently causing ...
Rate the pain in 3 categories
- The good
- The bad
- The ugly
Quantify the desire for the pain to go away
- Low
- Medium
- High
How much is the problem worth to the customer and their business if it's solved correctly?
How much more pain will this cause if the problem is solved incorrectly ... has to be redone?
How much is this problem costing you?
How much would you be willing to pay for a solution?
What’s the value to the end user?
What’s the value to the business?
What would make this project a overwhelming success?
What would cause this project to catastrophic failure?
How soon do you need it?
How soon will you buy it when it’s done being developed?
Who makes the final quality and buying decisions?
- Can we talk to them?
How quickly can you sell this?
Charge for early development, for example $5,000 to produce a strategic plan and prototypes doesn’t generate profit but does generate customer buy in.
Customers have committed ... so they will be more likely to communicate, follow up and ultimately buy if they have skin in the game early.
Ideation / Concept
- More simple experiments ... less than 30 minutes.
- More cardboard prototypes ... simple representations
- More ideas.
- More concepts.
- More knowledge ... more learning
So how do create more ideas ... concepts ... solutions?
We use the talking football, otherwise known as a talking stick to give everyone on the team a voice ... to make sure their voice is heard.
We use the thinking hats to generate ideas ... debate ... discussion ... constructive criticism ... Devil's advocate ... controversy.
If it's a bad idea .. we want to flush it out in the "Napkin Stage"
This is a divergent ... convergent thinking style ... go wide ... then go narrow
Simple Development Model
- Virtual Prototypes
- Rapid Prototypes
- Functional prototypes
- Production model
How do you know if your product is ready for market?
Expectations increase over time, so delivering rapid prototypes and keeping constant communication helps ensure success
The goal or objective doesn't change ... how you get there can change.
Development In A Nutshell
- Don’t develop in a vacuum
- Speed & accuracy wins
- Avoid “perfect plan” syndrome
- Explicitly state your assumptions ... Then challenge them
- Under promise & over deliver
Travis "Grizzly" Jacobs saw that picture when I was teaching project management. What customers expect and what is delivered to them. The whole requirements engineering redefined. Thank you, loving your articles.
Full stack architect and developer
5 年One of the pitfalls of doing customer driven development is to ensure that what you produce is broad based such that it is also useful to other customers. Otherwise it is going to be a dead investment. You will have one happy customer and 100 unhappy ones.
Quality Leader, Process and Tools Leader, Program Manager, Continuous Improvement Specialist, The views expressed are those by me and me alone, and are not associated with the views of present or past employers.
5 年Awesome list, Travis. This should be posted in every Product Development War Room. Many thanks for sharing. The only items I think are missing are: How do our capabilities/features/talents match the customer's needs? Which capabilities do we have on hand? Which do we need to develop? How are our competitors matched to the customer's needs? What are our areas of strengths and weaknesses relative to our competitors?
Product Development, Innovation, Mechanical Engineering, Creativity, Leadership, Communication
5 年I'd love to get your thoughts on this article Katelyn Bourgoin. Are we missing something? Are we headed in the wrong direction? Are we missing the boat? Anything you would add or change? Do you completely hate it? Thanks So Much Cheers Grizzly
Product Development, Innovation, Mechanical Engineering, Creativity, Leadership, Communication
5 年Thanks Nick Reed Smith?for the feedback ... the help ... the contribution ... the sounding board .. the ideas. What started as an email that contained no more than 5 words ... turned into a few conversations ... a few documents shared back and forth ... turned into a series of articles and questions. I hope they are useful and add value to the overall development community at large ... and aren't just noise cluttering the discussion Cheers Grizzly