By Marc Benevento
Industrial Market Insight
Do you want to get new products to market faster? Who doesn’t? However, innovation and new product development often take longer than expected, leading to depressed new product sales, excessive resource consumption, and a diminished bottom line. Having a clear understanding of the benefits sought by target customers and their relative significance — their “wants” versus “needs” — allows product development teams to eliminate superfluous features, focus on what is important to customers, and accelerate progress.
Although there many causes of product development delays, some of the more common lack of clear performance targets for development teams and attempts to add too many features into the product. Without clear development targets, teams don’t know when the product is “done” so they continue tinkering with it to make it just a little be better before releasing it for sale.
By adding too many features, the development becomes more complicated, and it is unclear how trade-offs of features should be prioritized. For example, does your material need to be tougher or stronger? How much of either will make a difference the customer is willing to pay for?
These are not only issues on “big” projects. In fact, these problems tend to plague your entire product development portfolio because it is thought the effort to clearly identify customer needs isn’t required for small projects. This is a myth that needs to be busted. Even small projects need to address a significant customer need and have a strong value proposition in order to be successful.
Now for some good news: both of these issues can be tackled by taking time to obtain a quantified measure of customer needs as you develop the value proposition for your new product.
By obtaining a quantitative understanding of what is most important for customers to achieve, decisions of how to prioritize features – and which can be eliminated – become crystal clear. Fewer features means less complexity and faster product development.
Once you’ve decided on the features that customer value most, you can dial in to exactly how much change needs to be made to keep customers completely satisfied. In this way, you will know when you’ve done enough to make a measurable difference that they are wiling to pay for. Industrial Market Insight uses processes such as New Product Blueprinting to identify and quantify desired customer outcomes that will accelerate your product development and increase new product sales.
Industrial Market Insight can help you identify and prioritize unmet customer needs, leading to products that exceed expectations. We have programs, tools, and resources developed specifically for manufacturers and distributors of industrial products.
Marc Benevento
President
Industrial Market Insight