The PDMA Handbook of New Product Development

14.2. Basic Principles for Obtaining Customer Needs

The objective of this chapter is to define and present techniques for obtaining the qualitative customer needs necessary to start product development. These needs can be used for quantitative market research later in the project (see Chapter 18). More important, this information provides the detailed understanding of the functional nuances to the development team that will dictate the engineering trade-offs they make during product development. The techniques presented focus on producing rich, detailed, context-specific information and ensuring that this information is transferred completely to those who need it, the development team.

NOTE

Current customers and potential users can provide reliable information about the problems and needs they experience, those that are relevant to them. For each person, this is a subset of the full set of information needed for effective product development.

14.2.1. Defining Customer Needs

Customer needs are the problems that a product or service solves and the functions it performs. They describe what products let you do, not how they let you do it. For example, many businesspeople have a need to "be able to do any work I want, wherever I am." General needs and problems are fairly stable, they change only slowly, if at all, over time.

Features deliver the solutions to peoples' problems. Features are the ways in which products function—a portable PC delivers a partial solution to being able ...