Addressing the Front End of Product Development How you approach product development can determine whether you create money-making products that delight customers or products that provide no value to customers and contribute nothing to (or actually hurt) profitability. Whether you end up with a delighter or a dud depends on how successfully you address the so-called
fuzzy front end of product development -- that often ill-defined part of the process that precedes the actual building of the product.
What is Market-Driven Product Definition?
PDC's Market-Driven Product Development (MDPD) Process is a fact-based methodology designed to demystify and define this fuzzy front-end. Unlike other
methodologies, PDC's customer-centric approach provides a road map that not only bridges the enormous gap between theory and practice but also begins at
the logical starting point: the customer. Using this approach to understand the voice of the customer, you probe the customer's beliefs, desires, and environment and use the results to answer the trickiest product development questions:
- What are the meaningful customer/market
requirements for a new or enhanced product?
- Which customer requirement will the product
development effort target to create competitive differentiation in the market?
- What tradeoffs can be made and how will these
affect the product?
- Which product features represent value for
customers and which exceed customer expectations?
What does MDPD offer?
PDC's Market-Driven Product Definition (MDPD) Process identifies customers' value-based needs and turns those needs (expressed as customer requirements) into successful products. It provides:
- A structured methodology for the fuzzy front end of product development
- A method for building consensus and buy-in from
team members
- A process by which to develop innovative solutions
- A way to generate unambiguous customer requirements facilitated by metrics
- A systematic approach to assigning priorities
- A product development process that everyone in the company can use
- A tool to help identify where to invest development
dollars
Applying MDPD helps you avoid unnecessarily changing product requirements (often known as creeping elegance or feature creep). We place the data collection, processing and analysis work in the
hands of a cross-functional team to improve the clarity of requirements and enhance the credibility of solutions. The process also creates a validated
framework that invites buy-in by key participants in the product development
process.
MDPD Benefits
Clients using MDPD have reported:
- Significantly lower levels of misdirected effort
- Fewer product specification changes
- Higher degrees of design problem resolutions
- A deeper understanding of customer requirements
- 40 percent decrease in time-to-market compared to others not employing this market-oriented approach
Can your company benefit from MDPD? Contact us today to find out.
