Abstract
Chapter 13 led us into the “front end” of the product development process, with a perspective that focused on the market. Readers should have left that chapter understanding how firms can interpret market needs and come up with a concise description of the product and of the market segment to address.
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Notes
- 1.
If one thinks about a simple product such as the remote control for a TV set, a user need elicited during market research may be “I don’t want to have to put my eyeglasses on when operating the remote control”. The firm may therefore decide to cope with this need by asserting the following requirement “button labels must be readable in 50 lux (dim light) by a user having a visual impairment of—1diopters”. The requirement may then be translated into a specification such as “characters for button labels must be at least 6 mm tall and must be color-contrasted with their background”.
- 2.
In the remote control example, it is up to the company to decide on the degree of readability of button labels with respect to illumination level and the degree of visual impairment, and to decide whether 6 mm tall and color-contrasted characters would adequately meet such requirement.
- 3.
When defining character size for button labels, the designer is assuming that the remote control will be operated with physical buttons, which is only one of the many possible technical solutions allowing the required functions to be carried out (for instance, a remote control might be conceived with a touch screen-based interface).
- 4.
For instance, suppose users of a high-end digital camera ask for a “reliable” product, where “reliability” implies a defined number of years before the product fails and has to be replaced. The manufacturer will probably view a connection between this need and the expected lifetime of the mechanical shutter, expressed in thousands of actuations. However, it will be possible to connect the requirement to a specification only if the manufacturer correctly defines the “mission profile” of the camera. In this simple example, the product brief might recite: “this camera is aimed at photography enthusiasts and professionals who need a stand-in product along to their main camera”. The manufacturer will therefore have to define the number of yearly shutter actuations that can be expected to be made by the customers belonging to these two segments.
- 5.
User-centered design actually merges three different design approaches, and namely cooperative design, from the Scandinavian tradition of design of IT artifacts (Greenbaum and Kyng 1991), participatory design*, by the North American design school (Schuler and Namioka 1993), and contextual design*, that connects customer-centered design to the actual circumstances surrounding the “use situation” (Beyer and Holtzblatt 1997). User-centered design has become a formalized procedure through the ISO standard “Human-centred design for interactive systems” (ISO 9241–210, 2010).
- 6.
For instance, one may define “Marie, 35-year old IT professional, mom of two children (4-year-old Susie and 2-year-old Jean). She is the wife of Robert, an airline pilot who is often away from home. They live in an apartment in the XV Arrondissement of Paris”. Diversity may be increased by adding to the family “Jeanne, Robert’s 70-year-old mother, who lives close to Robert and Marie and sometimes borrows their car to visit her friends during the weekend”.
- 7.
For example, a scenario associated to Mary’s usage of the family car might be “Mary has collected her kids from school and now is in the grocery store’s parking lot, having to move items from the shopping cart to the trunk of the car”. This scenario can be further split into a best-case scenario such as “the sun is shining, the kids are happy and singing a song”, and the worst-case scenario “it’s raining heavily, the kids are crying and a phone call is coming from Singapore, where Robert is minutes away from taking-off for a long-haul flight”.
- 8.
A distinction can be made between slips and mistakes, the former being errors in the execution of appropriate actions, the latter being errors associated to the very action to be taken. For instance, a slip occurs if a user that must press a button presses both the right one and—inadvertently—another one that is located too close. It would be a mistake if the user pressed the wrong button, having misunderstood the functions associated to it.
- 9.
For instance, a self-steering car capable of keeping the same lane with unpredictable traffic could be currently difficult to develop from a technical and regulatory perspective. Current lane assist systems therefore augment drivers’ perception by providing feedback if the vehicle leaves the lane, for instance by making the steering wheel vibrate. Such feedback must of course be easy to interpret (e.g., a buzzer would not fully meet this criterion).
- 10.
For instance, in the case of a public transport bus, the buyer is the purchasing office of a municipal transport authority, the users will be the employees, such as bus drivers and maintenance crews, and the direct beneficiaries are the passengers who buy tickets and ride the bus. External beneficiaries include citizens being affected by the emissions of the vehicle, or pedestrians who may be impacted by the bus—quite literally in fact—in case of an accident.
- 11.
Referring to the public transport example, it is obvious to assume that—all the rest being equal —managers will prefer a bus that minimizes harmful emissions, even without being directly influenced by citizens. However, the importance that management will attach to this need may be altered if citizens actively cast such an influence through a citizens-rights association.
- 12.
We have often observed salesmen interact with the product development team and ask “the features you are proposing for this product are cool, but how are we going to sell it?”.
- 13.
For instance, a new bus that comes with a powerful but difficult-to-use IT-based fleet management system will probably not be adopted, because drivers will object to the procurement office and oppose the purchasing decision, or may simply avoid using it once it has been bought. Conversely, a system that is user-friendly but expensive will probably be vetoed by managers even if drivers push for its adoption, unless the latter are able to show that it will lead to financial benefits that out-weight the additional cost.
- 14.
The bias emerges because product developers usually have a technical competence and an inclination for technology that is far superior to users’. Moreover, the target customer segment can be significantly different from the one that the product development team is used to consider (e.g., a team that has to develop a new car model for a geographical market in which the team has no prior experience).
- 15.
It is probably appropriate to remind that these average ratings should not be computed on the entire sample used for market research, but only on the subset of respondents that can be associated to the customer segment the product is being targeted to.
- 16.
For instance, in a passenger car it makes sense to specify maximum speed and acceleration, but not engine horsepower and torque, which would be the corresponding specifications at engine level.
- 17.
For instance, a firm may set the price of a product by computing the annual savings or profits P it determines on a customer firm, and hypothesizing that customers will purchase it if its price PR ≤ P PBT, where PBT is a payback time.
- 18.
For instance, parametric models can be based on rules such as “surface treatment X costs 22 €/m2”, or “with technology Y, the cost of producing parts like this is about 12 €/cm3 , adding 2 € per each geometric feature to be machined”.
- 19.
For instance, a die used in an injection molding process will be a fixed cost up to a given production level. After that threshold is passed, the firm will have to invest in a second die.
- 20.
For instance, if the cost driver used is direct labor hours, the firm will first compute the total annual cost of the overhead cost pool, TAC, and the total labor hours worked, TLH. It will then determine an “overhead rate” of TAC/TLH €/hour, which will be added to the direct costs of the product.
- 21.
A difference is sometimes made between learning effects and curves (Wright 1936) and experience effects and curves (Henderson 1974), the former related to labor productivity and the latter to overall efficiency. The two phenomena follow mathematical models that are equivalent, and we will therefore consider the two interchangeably in the following discussion.
- 22.
For a review of learning curve models, readers may refer to Anzanello and Fogliatto (2011).
- 23.
When dealing with continuous improvement projects, it is customary to say that it is easy to “pick low-hanging fruit” at first. Following on this analogy, exponential learning would be as if fruit had already fallen on the ground, and one simply had to find it hidden in the grass.
- 24.
For instance, an automotive manufacturer that is developing a passenger car may decide to incorporate components that are more expensive but more reliable than the ones that were previously used, and therefore decrease servicing requirements for the vehicle.
- 25.
For example, if customers are unwilling to pay a higher price for a system that has very low maintenance costs, a producer might find it highly profitable to start leasing it. This is especially true if the producer is able to secure finance at low interest rates, while customers base their purchasing decisions on short-term criteria such as Payback Time.
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Cantamessa, M., Montagna, F. (2016). Specifying the Product. In: Management of Innovation and Product Development. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6723-5_14
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