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Six
Critical Pillars of New Product
Success
Continued
By David Clark, New Business Development
Manager,
the Malco Design & Deliver Group
This is the second installment in our series on the
importance
of pre-design preparation.
Last month
we talked about the importance of gaining a solid
understanding
of our customers using market research. We
touched
briefly on using both qualitative and quantitative
research.
The second
pillar we will talk about is Performance
Requirements.
Customers
buy products to solve a problem. These problems
can
generally be described as either functional or emotional.
Functional
problems revolve around what the product actually
does. Emotional problems revolve around how the consumer
feels
relative to the purchase (i.e. ego, esteem, security).
There
are both functional and emotional motivations involved in
every purchase decision, whether the customer is aware of
them or not.
Market
research at the start of the project will help your team
understand
the customer, and what problems they need to
solve.
Your solution will need to meet certain "performance
requirements" to be considered a desirable "solution"
in the
eyes
of your customer. Customers buy solutions, not
products.
Customer
performance requirements must be documented;
not
only for the sake of remembering them, but to keep your
project focused.
For the
same reason, it is equally important to define what you
don't want the product to do. Requirements are all about
making
decisions; what to include and what not to include.
Each requirement
must be committed to writing, be
quantifiable
(whenever possible), and be weighed against the
cost
of supplying it. A product that tries to solve too many
needs
can quickly become cost prohibitive, too big to be
functional,
be too confusing for the consumer, or make too
many compromises to be effective at solving any problem.
Success
in new product development requires you to find the
optimal balance of features, size, cost, and other constraints
for each new product.
Good documentation
of performance requirements at the start
of your project will yield tremendous benefits in keeping
the
project
on task, on time, and on budget.
Poor or
non-existent documentation is an invitation for your
project
to loose focus, go off on a tangent, waste time, waste
money,
and/or fail to meet the needs of your customer.
For more
information on documenting Performance
Requirements,
please feel free to call a member of our staff.
Next
month, the third pillar: Unit Volume.
Go
back to Malco Newsletters
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