In his article, Turn Customer Input into Innovation, in the Harvard Business Review (2002), A.W. Ulwick looks at a case study of how to structure the gathering of customer information and use it in innovating a product. The main idea of the article is to inquire about customer-desired outcomes, rather than customer-desired products, when it comes to putting their ideas onto the factory floor.
The steps that one company took to go from customer-desired outcome to an actual factory-produced outcome are outlined as follows:
Step 1 – Divide the function of product up into a step-by-step procedure. Invite in a wide range of customers who are familiar with each step of the procedure and interview them.
Step 2 – A moderator asks the customers to describe their desired outcome, not the design of the product, for each step of the procedure. Lots of adjectives are thrown out, like “I would like it smaller”, “thinner”, “not so sticky”, etc.
Step 3 – The customer descriptions are sorted and duplicates are removed. The company now has a complete list of descriptions that the customer values or deems important.
Step 4 – The customer are asked to prioritize each item by placing a qualifying value on how satisfied they are with each modification. These values are fed into a mathematical formula to determine the relative attractiveness of each possibility. These were written in function form, not as a product description.
Step 5 – The company’s design team converts the functional descriptions into product modification, or in some cases, totally new products.
The results are incredible, because of the customer feedback gathered at the input level. The key to this success is to have the customer feedback focus on desired outcome, not desired product.