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 Part
1 | Part 2
An Interview with
Sheila Mello (1/2)
Getting the
Customer's Pain:
Using Customer-Centered Definition to Drive Product Development - Part 1
 Consultant
and author, Sheila Mello, has brought her extensive experience to
bear on the problem of developing new products that both address
genuine
customer needs and are
innovative. Her new
book,
Customer-Centric Product
Definition (AMACOM, 2002), outlines a
process called “Market Driven Product Definition” (MDPD) which takes
the guesswork out of the discovery of customer requirements.
MDPD is a replicable process for
discovering, understanding, systematizing and prioritizing customer
requirements – including customer’s latent needs. The process
encourages cross-functional involvement in a program of visits where
developers observe customers in their native environment, developing
a holistic view of their products in actual use. In
the first part
of this interview, Mello shows that by asking customers probing
questions that “get to the customer’s pain,” product developers can
ensure a greater likelihood of success at product launch.
PDBPR: People have
been talking about “voice of the customer” and the “fuzzy front end”
for years. What’s innovative in your approach to these issues?
Sheila Mello: What’s really
innovative is truly using the voice of the customer to drive product
development. Companies have not integrated the voice of the customer
into their product development processes very effectively. In terms
of the product definition process, not a lot has changed over the
past ten years. Even though the tools have been there, the tools
have not been integrated and the organization has not been
integrated enough around the product definition process.
Engineering
sees the need for in depth research into customer needs. On the
other hand, marketing sees this activity as its core function. The
intent behind the book was to write something that marketing people,
as well as engineers, would understand.
It was always easier to get
engineering to understand the value because they suffered the pain.
The book is about elevating people’s consciousness to the fact that
they aren’t focusing enough on customers. We wanted to get the
message out as to what pain it causes when you don’t have a
customer-centric product definition process like this and what kind
of benefits a firm can enjoy – particularly if it ties this type of
innovation to being innovative as a company.
PDBPR: In your book
you say that the MDPD process can take 3-4 months. Readers might
expect that they’ll need to hire someone to help them through it.
Can’t the same customer information be gleaned using traditional
market research tools: surveys, customer interviews, focus groups,
etc.? Can’t you get as much from these tools as you would from MDPD.
SM:
The biggest difference between MDPD and the other techniques you
mention is that MDPD is a holistic approach. Individual tools like
focus groups, for example, are very good at addressing what the
customer needs are as of today. People that come into a focus group,
focus on the current reality. But if you want people to focus on
their gut – on what they really need, or even on what’s really
bothering them, then you have to get them in a one-on-one situation
in their own environment. You need to see the world in which they
live and play and the problems they face on a daily basis.
If people think that three to four
months is too long to take to understand their customers, then I
would ask them how much time they spend doing it now. Oftentimes,
they don’t know. My response is: “why don’t you know? Is it because
it’s too long?” I would also emphasize that if you’re going to spend
three or four months understanding your customer’s requirements,
don’t feel that you have to do it in a serial way. We have had very
successful implementations of this process where the client had
already started development. Their current release may have minor
tweaks to it as a result of the data they gather from customers, but
they are able to respond by,
-
arming the sales force so that
they know where the weaknesses are, and they know where the
competition is, which makes for a much more effective launch,
and
- their next release will be on
target. Doing MDPD in parallel with the development process
sometimes works well for people.
However, you do create more rework
and you don’t really get much “bang” on that first release. But, you
need to start somewhere and overlapping with current development
reduces the impact MDPD might have on Time-to-Market.
PDBPR: You have
said that one of the innovations here is that this process gives
developers access to latent needs. In your book you discuss “mining
the golden nugget,” which is a process of asking probing questions
to get to a crucial data point you might have not discovered
otherwise. Can you give an example of a “golden nugget” and what a
team did to discover it?
SM:
Asking probing questions that get to the golden nugget – by which we
mean the fertile ground of customer needs and emotions beneath the
surface of expressed and tacit data – is about getting to the level
of the pain experienced by the customer. It’s not so much that the
questions we ask are particularly unique… but it’s rather that we
continue to probe and to repeat the questions.
One question that is
often asked is: “what is getting in the way of your being
successful?” One example of a golden nugget comes from Norand (now
Intermec), which made hand held computers for use in warehousing and
inventory control applications. One critical requirement was the
life of the battery used in the hand-held device. The ideal battery
would last about eight hours but one that would meet the size and
weight requirements would last about two-and-a-half hours.
The
developers made the assumption that users would recharge the
batteries during break time or during lunch. For the developers, the
golden nugget was discovered only by being in that warehouse and
actually observing the life of the person using the product by
walking through his or her day. What they saw was that their
customers traveled large distances in a day – as much as a quarter
mile from one end of the warehouse to another. And, when they did
get a break, they went to small break area nearby, and not all the
way back to their original location where they could charge their
computers.
Norand got to the customer’s pain when they realized that
their customers didn’t want to take away from their own break time
to deal with equipment. Users would recharge the battery during
regular work hours – which would be a net loss of productivity for
the warehouse. Norand’s customer’s problem was the need to improve
productivity without having the end user’s own time disrupted. That
was “a golden nugget” for these developers.
PDBPR: So the
golden nugget often relates to “getting to the customer’s pain…”
SM: It relates to getting to their
pain and it relates to getting into their environment, which is
another reason why focus groups don’t work. There’s a need for you,
the developer, to experience what you’re user’s experience is;
there’s a need to get a sense of the end user’s complete experience
with your product – soup to nuts. Generally, people spend too much
time focusing around the product. One of the biggest challenges is
getting people to change their focus. In the MDPD process, we don’t
want people to talk about the product – we want them to talk about
the person.
In the hand held computer example we were speaking about
earlier, if you really understand that worker in the warehouse and
what he is measured on, and what is most difficult for him, and even
what drives him crazy, as well as what makes him happy, and what he
dreams about, and what he wishes he could have, you are then able to
become innovative when you return to your own environment. You now
understand the complete setting in which your product has to play.
This product definition process plays to more than just the product
– it plays to the whole product lifecycle.
PDBPR: When you get to
the pain or to the wish is it then that you know you’ve heard a
genuine customer requirement?
SM:
People get very excited when they get to the customer’s wish. They
don’t realize that that isn’t enough. When you get to the wish
that’s the sign that it’s time to ask: “If you had what you just
wished for, what problem would it solve?” And then we would
recommend that you ask, “Could you give us a real example of when
that problem occurred, and how what you just proposed would have
solved it.” All the questions are really trying to get at the pain.
When you understand that, then you understand what will make your
customer really change. And new products are all about people
changing. In many cases, when new products are introduced, potential
customers look at them and say, “wouldn’t that be great…but I’d have
to change this and I’d have to change that and it’s just not worth
it.” When you get to the pain you also have something you can use in
the PR and advertising campaign. It is not sufficient to alleviate
people’s pain with your new product; you also have to motivate the
customer to buy by showing them how your product helps them. And
this is another reason why getting to the pain is so important.
PDBPR: In your book
you speak of customer “images” and customer “voices,” and you say
that, “images” plus “voices” equals “requirements.” What’s the
distinction between an “image” and a “voice”?
SM:
Suppose, for example, that your customer is a medical products
company. Your customer might provide an image such as: “The person
from the FDA is looming in the background all the time.” Imagine
what it’s like to live with this FDA presence as an ongoing reality!
That’s an image. From that same image you also hear a customer’s
voice saying: “I need to be able get a higher level of accuracy as
I’m producing this product,” or “I can’t tell whether I’m achieving
the level of accuracy I need in this regulatory environment.”
Those
kinds of statements can then be tied with the image, from the
environment, which says, “I’ve got big brother watching me and he
could shut us down…and I could be the cause of it.” The image
completes the picture you receive from listening to the customer’s
voice.
In this example it allows you to say, “The customer is not
just concerned with yield in manufacturing, but also with testing,
and with all the places that problems could occur in a highly
regulated environment.” The image enables you to create as many as
ten different requirement statements from just one customer voice.
Sometimes different images combined with similar voices create quite
different scenarios. For example, another customer of the same
hypothetical medical products organization might say that what is
important to him is that his paycheck is small because his pay is
tied to manufacturing yield. So, in this case, you might have
conflicting customer feedback – a concern about quality as well as a
concern about yield.
Sometimes you have opposing requirements coming
out of different images and voices within the same organization. A
classic example is the hospitals in India one of our clients was
involved with. In India, there is a very strong sense of taking care
of the patient – not having the patient feel pain, for example, and
doing everything necessary to meet the patient’s needs.
On the other
hand, in some hospitals it was routine that the patient was expected
to carry around his or her own uncovered blood sample. So you have
the nurse who doesn’t know that that is not the best way to do blood
samples, and may not even know that there are alternative methods,
and yet we also heard this driving image that said, “I really want
to help this patient.”
These are the images in a hospital without
which one wouldn’t be able to know what needs are – and are not –
being met. If you’re really going to make a difference with your
product then you need to understand the dynamics that are playing in
the environment in which it is used, as well as any pressures that
your customers might be experiencing. Only by getting to their pain
will you understand the product definition equation.
Part 1
| Part 2
>
This article originally appeared in the
July 2002
issue of PDBPR
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