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Voice of the Customer (Voices of the Customers) & Competitive Analysis 
How to link the Voice of the Customer and Competitive Analysis to define winning  products. Download here **

Customers have become increasingly more sophisticated in their knowledge of product and service quality, and their lifestyles have become more complex. Consequently, they have become more demanding and their needs and wants have become more diverse. At the same time competition in the global marketplace has become more intense so that customers have more and more choice in terms of the mix of performance, price and delivery available to them.

This has taken customer satisfaction from an option to an imperative for success in today's highly competitive environment, which applies equally to end users or consumers as well as business to business customers. Contrary to the historical bad practice of assuming that the product developers know customer needs intuitively, this article contends that: firstly, customers themselves are a prime source of information if we can help them express those needs and secondly, early prototypes coupled with other tools described here can help gain insight (more than understanding) of customers’ future needs

The Reality of Virtual teams     
Virtual Product Development cross-functional teams, Global multi-functional Virtual Teams.  Download here **

Nothing has such huge potential for reaping the advantages of fast Time to Market as getting people to work together - BUT nothing seems as fraught as actually doing it!!! This is supported by the fact that The UK's Time to Market Association has run workshops on the topic of Product Development Teams, Virtual Teams and Global Product Development for a number of years and the subject still provokes debate. The  article explores some of the issues surrounding the evolution of New Product Development from being just a design department activity to being the responsibility of Global multi-functional Virtual Teams.

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Strategic Outsourcing for New Product Development     
Strategic outsourcing and technology partnerships based on a benchmarking study for the pharmaceutical industry.  Download here **

"Luv ‘em, hate ‘em". Few subjects, in the context of product development, have as great an emotional character as do "partnerships". Run a workshop on the subject and you will be pretty near guaranteed that the turn-out will be low but, boy, will the passions be high!  The facts of life are that very few, if any, company today can afford to develop products without partnerships of one sort or the other. There is a varied and growing dependence on outside resources for components, sub-assembles, technology, design skills, know-how or resources. At the same time, benchmarking research has shown very clearly that the leveraging of partnerships can provide distinct competitive advantages.

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Planning and selecting ideas for winning product development 
Project selection and Product Planning tools for effective Product Life-Cycle management.  Download here **

Quite correctly, there has been a lot of focus on developing products in the ‘right’ way to achieve Quality, Cost and Time objectives. However, planning and choosing the ‘right’ products to develop is often the key to making profit from product development. Having an effective NPD process as a fundamental requirement for fast time to market is not sufficient to ensure success. A much bigger influence on profits can be the process of identifying customer needs and the required product changes and 'ideas' matching those opportunities against company objectives, resources and capabilities and then selecting the winners from those good opportunities. This part of product innovation is usually  termed ‘product and market strategy’, ‘product planning’ and ‘project selection’ or sometimes the ‘fuzzy front end’.

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Customer Experience and Product Leadership
Published in the IEE’s Engineering Management magazine December/January 2005/6, Volume 15, Issue 6: www.iee.org/mgt.  Download here **

Increasingly, the twin pressures of rising customers’ expectations and intense competition are driving companies to discover and implement new ways to improve their chances of commercial success. Success is often measured by the growth of a company’s value to its shareholders, management and employees and is founded on the achievement of three core capabilities or ‘value vectors’: product or service offering leadership; customer and market focus; and operational excellence.nSome companies concentrate on only one or other of these ‘value vectors’ and hope it will bring success, however, it is our experience that all three vectors need to be aligned and working together.

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Competitive Product Intelligence: Using Voices of Customers and Competitive Analysis to drive Product Leadership.  Download here **

In many organisations product management and technical people are not well ‘connected‘ with either customers or the competition’s products and competitive information can often be ‘lost in translation’. In particular, a deep understanding and knowledge of the different types of customers (e.g. End Users, Installers, Dealers, Regulators, ….. ) and their needs and expectations requires detailed analysis. A deep understanding of how well your products and the competitive products meet those needs leads to Competitive Product Intelligence, which is a requirement for achieving commercial success. Additionally, studying the use of your own and competitive products in the ‘field’ is a great source of learning about customers’ needs and perceptions (Customers’ WHATs) and their translation into technical ‘HOWs’.This also allows us to understand product cost drivers and compare alternative product architectures.

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