Customer-centric Product Definition: The Key to Great Product Development Review

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Customer-centric Product Definition: The Key to Great Product Development ReviewThis book lays out a step-by-step approach for new product development. I like the way they do their surveys and customer visits.
The first 1/3 of the book was a little dry, but the book overall is very easy to read. It was hard to put down as I was very interested in how they would put the whole process together. Some of the examples and tables needed more explanation. They were not as clear as they could have been. But overall this is a highly recomended book. Probably a MUST READ.
Although this book is largely "on target" in terms of how to organize your customer-centric approach to product development... I think it lacks certain human intuitive points. For example, there was no discussion of the name of the product, nor much on ergonomics. This book needs to be read in conjunction of those by Barry Feig and Doug Hall.
In this regard, I would think that a company like HP would use this type of approach, but not Steve Jobs of Apple.
I learned several important quantitative approaches to measuring what the customer wants. But at the same time I think their quantitative approach may be somewhat utopian. For example, when you do your customer visits and later your surveys, you may find that you discover something new... so you scramble and change your questions to proceed further. This would mess up the data in their approach. Thus, I think the process is a little more messy in real life. And, for really important decisions, intuition plays a greater role. I don't think I made up a matrix decision chart when I decided to marry my wife. There are alot of decisions that are like this in the product development area.
Another area where I had trouble was in the use of "value mapping" analysis in doing trade offs for deciding what features need to be included. This is another one of those cases of over-relying on the matrix approach. Suppossedly we are to determine a customer value -- either on productivity improvements, cost reduction or other subjective judgements. Well, let me tell you, this is ripe for serious manipulation. All you can do is get the customer to react to your designs. You need to read the Barry Feig books for more discussion on this.
However, I will use their quantitative approach in my next product development quest, realizing that it may get messed up a little. I really liked their discussion of how to do questionaires (the Kano method was terrific).
I thought their discussion of developing customer images was also great, but I got the feeling that this was not the author's forte, as this was more intuitive type of thing. Regardless, this was valable to me and I'm glad they included this in the book.
Perhaps most important to me was their confirmation that the biggest reason for missing the customer's desires... was FAILURE TO PROBE. I wholeheartedly agree. That's one of the reasons I laugh when I see the mall interviewers asking all those closed-questions. The author does a great job of discussion this.
The author, Sheila Mello, passes my test for a business author: she is a consultant in the field. This is not a book by some college professor preaching his hands-off theories.
There was a lot that I agreed with in this book, and there was a lot of important ideas that I picked up, and will implement next time. I recommend that this book be read before the Feig and Hall books to provide you a base foundation for your approach.
Highly recomended book, if not MUST READ.
John Dunbar
Sugar Land, TXCustomer-centric Product Definition: The Key to Great Product Development OverviewDespite the prodigious research and money devoted to new product development, nearly nine in ten new products fail to solve a perceived need--and are gone within their first two years. This unique new book introduces and explains Market-Driven Product Definition (MDPD), a proven methodology for identifying and understanding customer-value-based needs, then turning them into products that consistently break through the clutter of the marketplace. Drawing on techniques developed by experts from MIT, the University of Chicago, and the Center for Management of Quality, as well as product development experiences from inside hundreds of top companies, including Abbott, Compaq, and Cisco, the book reveals MDPD techniques managers can use to: * Determine customer needs and value-based requirements * Choose which requirements to satisfy in order to distinguish their products from the competition * Determine which trade-offs can--and must--be made in product development * Decrease time to market by up to 40 percent and minimize time to profit.

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