Volume 5, #4, July 2007
An Inside Look
Behind the Scenes: MDPD Confidential
by Audrey Kalman
Some things, like becoming a parent or running a marathon, simply must be experienced before you can truly understand them. I would add to these the Market-Driven Product Definition Process developed by PDC. Parents and athletes might argue that a business process falls in a different category altogether, but as someone who has experienced all three, I can make the case that MDPD (Market-Driven Product Definition) is, in its own way, just as profound.
I have long been fascinated by a number of questions that loosely fall under the subject of organizational behavior. How do ideas formed inside one person's brain get out and influence the behavior of other people? How does leadership work? How can something that is not a biological organism "behave?" How do organizations make decisions? How do creative thoughts turn into something that customers can purchase? How does a company ever get anything done?
While most managers don't sit around pondering such questions, the answers do have some practical relevance. After the B-school classes are done, many of us graduate to a world where the academic study of organizations and related disciplines such as economics, sociology, anthropology, and psychology give way to the daily concerns of how to make a quota, meet a goal, or satisfy shareholders. That's why participating in the Market-Driven Product Definition (MDPD) process developed by PDC was so eye-opening for me. MDPD is a concrete, practical process whose application addresses questions usually left to the theoreticians.
Organizations Behaving Badly
As a marketing consultant and former staff marketing person, I have been present at many a product meeting. The methods I have seen employed for choosing new products to develop range from the ridiculous to the sublimely unobtainable:
- Whatever the founder wants to make
- Whatever our competitors just successfully launched
- The CTO's favorite pet project
- Whatever our biggest customer wants
- Anything related to the latest buzzword in the trade journals
- The project of the loudest and most persuasive product manager
- The product that 99 percent of the market said it would buy
The shortcoming in all of these is that they bear little or no relationship to customer needs. I wish I had known then what I know now: how to answer reliably the questions What really matters to customers? and What capabilities will they pay for?
Quantifying the Unquantifiable
In more than 8 years of working with PDC as a writer and marketer, I have interviewed the firm's principals about MDPD and helped explain its virtues as a method for defining and realizing products that are in tune with customer needs. But until I experienced the process myself, I didn't fully understand its power. The true surprise was that it seemed to provide an actual method for making business decisions related to new product definition, and, by extension, for turning an inspiration into a marketable product.
The essence of MDPD is that it takes something generally assumed to be unquantifiable -- the emotional expression of customer pain -- and puts it through a process that transforms it into a quantifiable set of requirements, either for a single product or for a portfolio of products.
Until you have experienced the process, it may be difficult to fathom how this can be done. The steps themselves are straightforward, although they require a great degree of rigor. The basis for the process is customer or prospect visits, during which a cross-functional team (previously trained) conducts and records open-ended interviews, which then are transcribed. The process subsequently applied to the transcription teases out visceral imagery representing customer pain and transforms it through a series of distillations to a manageable set of requirements, then tests the importance of those requirements through further surveying.
The Power of Silence
I found the distillation part of the process to be the most intriguing. It is conducted by a group, but rather than resulting in the quibbling or paralysis that often flows from attempts at group decision-making, the MDPD process offers a simple and elegant method for resolving conflict. Two parts of the process stood out for me. First, members of the MDPD team sit silently around a conference table covered with dozens of statements, each representing an image of the customer engaged in some activity related to accomplishing his or her job (for example, "I kept pushing the start button but I was never sure if the machine was actually on"). Each team member indicates with a dot whether an image seems important enough (to customers) to keep. In this manner, the team selects 20 or 30 key statements representing the issues that matter most to the customer.
In the next step, members of the MDPD team stand before a wall plastered with the 20 or 30 key images, each on its own sticky note. Team members move around one another in a soundless dance, grouping images that belong together to result in four or five major categories. These groupings unify what begin as disjointed pieces of information to provide a coherent, top-down look at they key issues customers face. Both activities are done in silence. When disagreement arises, there is opportunity for discussion and resolution based on some ground rules, but only after the silent selection and grouping.
I found MDPD's unique approach to collaboration to be one of the most fascinating parts of the process. At first, I wondered how something as seemingly random and imprecise as rankings could result in valid information. However, by building consensus in a way that does not allow a single voice to overpower others and by following up with further surveys to validate the findings, the MDPD process results in remarkably on-target assessments of customer needs. Because MDPD is data-based (direct customer interviews), rigorous (occurring through a series of well-defined steps), and collaborative, it lets innovative ideas be judged on their merits for the customer. And for me, it provides a captivating look into how the collections of individuals, ideas, and cultural habits we call "organizations" can actually accomplish useful work.
I wish I had known about MDPD in my days of working with a Silicon Valley startup Perhaps the company could have survived the dot-com bust if it had had a more robust approach to understanding customer needs. But then, I might not have found my way to working directly with PDC, and that would have been a shame.
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Audrey Kalman is a marketer, writer, and editor who has been helping companies communicate clearly and convincingly since 1985
PDC's first book, Customer-Centric Product Definition, explains how the MDPD process helps create products that delight customers.
Find out about using market-driven techniques to make product portfolio decisions in PDC's latest book, Value Innovation Portfolio Management: Achieving Double-Digit Growth Through Customer Value. Click to order a copy of the book.
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