Recently in Strategy & Process Category

I attended a panel on Sustainable Consumer Products tonight at the GSB. There were a couple brand managers from Method, one from Clorox GreenWorks, and the Global Sustainability Lead from IDEO. Interesting discussion, with some surprising overlaps with our recent design projects in ME-313, one having to do with health attitudes and habits, and the other exploring energy efficiency in consumers.

While health, energy efficiency, and environmentally friendly cleaning products have some significant differences, there's an interesting correlation in the attitudes and behaviors of consumers. Much of what the panel discussed were familiar insights observed through our needfinding interviews on both projects.

For example, I was surprised to learn that Method chooses to attract consumers not by touting the environmental friendliness of their products, but rather, with sleek and sexy packaging design that "pops" on the store shelves and just begs a consumer to take a bottle home. Their goal is to design a bottle that looks so good, consumers will feel comfortable leaving it out on the counter all the time. Only over time, as the consumer becomes familiar and comfortable with the product does Method expect them to read the label and learn about how environmentally conscious Method is.

Question: Which is better, to identify a customer or application with a need and then develop a product or technology around it, or to develop the product or technology first and then look for the right customer or application?

From a user-centered design perspective, I suppose you would want to have a clearly defined need to guide your design to ensure its success. Without a user in mind, how can you evaluate your design and decide whether it works?

On the other hand, it seems that this may not always be practical or realistic. If you come across a great new technology with impressive features and benefits, you would be foolish to pass on it because nobody has yet identified a specific user or explicitly articulated a clear need.

So how do you balance this? This is a problem I have been observing recently, where a company acquired some new sensing technology from an inventor that offered several impressive improvements on current sensing options. They have been working for about a year now, but have struggled to lock up customers and meet their financial targets.

It's pretty clear what the advantages of this technology are. It offers better reliability and durability than anything else available, allows for far greater design flexibility when incorporating sensing into applications and products, and has a rather advanced level of system intelligence in the form of self-monitoring and self-diagnosing.

However, it's less clear who can best use and benefit from this technology. The company has yet to find that "killer application" that will launch the technology into mainstream industry and make the company millions of dollars, much like word-processing and spreadsheets did for the PC.

So how does a company in a situation like this succeed? Perhaps a delicate balancing act of pushing development forward, offset with equal time and resources spent identifying key customers and applications. This particular company may very well be too far into development for the technology to ever succeed in its current manifestation. Maybe they need to pull back, get some input from potential customers and then proceed with the guidance and new information from users.

It’s like developing a new round peg made of titanium with a non-slip grip, and finding that nobody wants to buy it because they all have square holes. Everyone likes the idea of a non-slip grip and they’re impressed by the lightweight titanium, but your customers aren’t convinced that this peg really fits their needs. So then, what do you do at this point? Stick to your guns, continue promoting your new peg, and search for customers until you find one that has a round hole? What if you never find one? That would be an awful lot of time and money wasted.

Perhaps the lesson is that while it’s certainly not always feasible to have an application or user with a clearly defined need in mind before starting development, it's critical to identify that user and need as quickly as possible. They need to be questioned, interviewed, tested, observed, and every which way involved in development at the earliest possible stage. Otherwise, you run the risk of completing development of a great new product that everybody likes, but nobody needs or wants.

Maybe you didn’t know pegs would be the final manifestation of your non-slip grip and titanium design when you began your research and development. However, the moment you came to that realization, customers with peg holes should have become an integral part of your work. That way, perhaps you might have ended up with a shiny new square peg made of titanium with a non-slip grip, sold millions, gone public, and become the fourth-richest person in the world.

What would you make of a company that allows only their salespeople to interface with customers? What does it say about the company if their engineers don't discuss design with the customer, having little say in what they create? I have been working with a company lately that does just this--for the most part preferring that only the general manager and salespeople maintain contact with customers. Doesn't this effectively isolate many of those who are most involved with, knowledgeable about, and responsible for the company's product offering ?

From what I've seen, this seems to be the usual progression:

1) Customer tells Sales what he/she wants (Note: want ≠ need in many cases).
2) Sales relays Customer's wants to Engineering.
3) Engineering designs product to given specifications, and sends it back to Sales.
4) Sales presents design to Customer, who offers feedback (often likely to be negative)
5) Sales returns to Engineering and relays Customer's requested design changes.
6) Repeat Steps 3-5 ad nauseam--until Customer either finally accepts the design or gets sick of waiting around and finds someone else.

At virtually every step of the way, one party is relying on assumptions and inferences made about the other party and their wants and needs. Add in the probability of something getting lost in translation, and we have one twisted game of "Telephone" with significant financial consequences.

From my perspective, it seems virtually impossible to effectively develop successful products in a reasonable timeframe when you have a system as inefficient as this. No wonder projects are always behind schedule and customers seem perpetually annoyed! It's not that the engineers don't know how to design--they just don't know what to design because they don't understand the need or context.

It's as though they are peering at the customer through a telescope--completely removed from the application and seeing only the portion of the greater picture that appears in their lens. Most of the time, they can't even tell what they're looking at and have to rely on Sales to interpret for them.

Perhaps if they were involved early on, interacting with the customer from the start, they might stand a better chance of understanding the need and designing appropriately. Projects would flow more efficiently, customers would get their products on-time and might even stay cheerful, and solutions would be far more effective.

Unfortunately, change is not likely in this company. Everyone with whom I've ever discussed this not only considers it infeasible, but actually even better that they maintain a single point-of-contact with the customer. That way, they reduce confusion and avoid sending conflicting messages.

...How unfortunate and ironic then, that confusion is the main byproduct of their current mentality.

It amazes me that so many companies stay in business while often knowing very little about their customers and their needs. I was especially dumbfounded at work recently, when I took part in a program to launch development of a new machine for one of our commercial food equipment divisions.

This was to be "game-changing" and "revolutionary"; the "next generation" in food machines. Of the many innovations that were to be, ease of cleaning was a longtime customer complaint at the top of the design criteria list. However, when we decided to try out the machines to get a hands-on feel for potential improvements, it turns out that only three of the fourteen people in the room had ever cleaned a machine! I was absolutely stunned that anyone whose career revolves around these machines--whether in engineering, sales, marketing, or production--could know so little about its daily operation.

As someone who once cleaned seven machines, three times each, in two days of performance benchmarking, I had a true appreciation for just how difficult, time-consuming, and intimidating it was to clean one of these beasts.

How can you possibly understand and empathize with your users, and claim to be solving their needs without ever putting yourself in their shoes or experiencing what they go through on a daily basis?