The PDMA Handbook of Innovation and New Product Development, 4th Edition

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN OBTAINING CUSTOMER NEEDS FOR PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Abbie Griffin

27.1 Why Your Development Team Must Understand Customer Needs in Depth

Products and services that don’t solve people’s problems, or don’t solve them at a competitive cost, fail. Motorola discovered this with Iridium. Iridium’s main function was to enable wireless communication worldwide. However, in developing a solution to this problem, potential users were not asked about the details of or the specifics for what that meant. Thus, the technology solution chosen – satellite delivery to a bulky phone requiring a large antenna that could only be used outdoors and was very expensive to buy and make phone calls – did not achieve the physical functionality customers wanted simultaneously with the communications functionality. The vast majority of customers were willing to give up coverage in some very remote places for smaller, lightweight phones. The result was predictable: the demise of Iridium, with an $8 billion technology development write-off.

The most successful new products match a set of fully understood consumer problems with a cost-competitive solution to those problems.

The most successful product development efforts match a set of fully understood customer¹ problems with a cost-competitive solution to those problems. “The devil is in the details,” as they say. Palm’s first Palm Pilot ...