In the venture capital game, there's a litmus test that entrepreneurs are told to adhere to if they want to improve their chances to be the next golden garbage pail for the pocket-bursting elite. It's called the "elevator pitch." Basically, you need to be able to boil down the essence of your business plan to a 30-second, simple-yet-brilliant soliloquy, as if you had to give the pitch on an elevator ride. This reminds me of SAT scores. It's called "thinning the herd."

Now let's apply that to product development. What's the elevator pitch of the product you're currently working on? Why should I buy from you and not your competitor? The answer is easy if you're Harley-Davidson. The answer is unintelligible if you're selling a "Dial 10-10-X" collect call service. How many watch owners know what "quartz accuracy" means or even used it as a purchase criteria?

Trying to understand and leverage your customer's and potential customer's buying behavior is all about logic, most of it fuzzy. Much of it can be determined intuitively - of course, this leans more towards consumer products than industrial. Everyone reading this is a consumer, therefore we all engage in similar mental exercises that prompt the action of reaching in our pocket for paper or plastic. Everyone from engineers to marketers draw from these experiences when working on our own projects. This is not to say that actual customers are ignored in this process, but you have to start from a base, and nothing is more accessible than what's already in your own brain. Listen openly to customers, but don't ignore yourself.

Where it gets confusing is in differentiation. The more "me toos" in your space, the harder it is to determine how to win customers. Which features should marketing and sales highlight to customers? Is it the ergonomic interface or is it the longer battery life? Do I push my lower price point or the fact that my MTBF is the best around? Which approach will make my company the most money? Where should I focus my limited development resources?

The "Freedom of Information Act", aka the Internet, is very disruptive to the traditional ways we try to find out the answers to the above questions, but also presents unique opportunities to solve them. For example, it becomes harder to do a price test when there are a million websites whose sole purpose is to hunt down the best deal. But you can monitor a user's forum and get some of the richest real-time information available from lead users on everything from feature wish lists to bug reports. Such "community-based" consumer information sharing is increasingly influencing customer choice.

As you can see, the issues involved are as deep as they are complicated. If you are interested in learning more, you may want to download from our website a free copy of Peter Marks' white paper, "Differentiation in the e-World". This paper clearly outlines and models the basic economics and human psychology of customer purchase behavior and its implications for product developers. Once you've read the paper, we have also created a bulletin board system for ongoing discussion and problem solving. See the links below to learn how to access these resources.

We've had considerable interest in the workshop, "Implementing the TOC Multi-Project Method" recently held at our "Applying Constraints Management" conference last month in Chicago. This session was created and is led by Tony Rizzo, a recognized expert in applying theory of constraints tools to product development. Due to the high level of interactivity, attendance was limited to 25 seats, which sold out quickly.

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