16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great foundation for a product development process, April 12, 2002
This book lays out a step-by-step approach for new product development. I like the way they do their surveys and customer visits.
The first 1/3 of the book was a little dry, but the book overall is very easy to read. It was hard to put down as I was very interested in how they would put the whole process together. Some of the examples and tables needed more explanation. They were not as clear as they could have been. But overall this is a highly recomended book. Probably a MUST READ.
Although this book is largely "on target" in terms of how to organize your customer-centric approach to product development... I think it lacks certain human intuitive points. For example, there was no discussion of the name of the product, nor much on ergonomics. This book needs to be read in conjunction of those by Barry Feig and Doug Hall.
In this regard, I would think that a company like HP would use this type of approach, but not Steve Jobs of Apple.
I learned several important quantitative approaches to measuring what the customer wants. But at the same time I think their quantitative approach may be somewhat utopian. For example, when you do your customer visits and later your surveys, you may find that you discover something new... so you scramble and change your questions to proceed further. This would mess up the data in their approach. Thus, I think the process is a little more messy in real life. And, for really important decisions, intuition plays a greater role. I don't think I made up a matrix decision chart when I decided to marry my wife. There are alot of decisions that are like this in the product development area.
Another area where I had trouble was in the use of "value mapping" analysis in doing trade offs for deciding what features need to be included. This is another one of those cases of over-relying on the matrix approach. Suppossedly we are to determine a customer value -- either on productivity improvements, cost reduction or other subjective judgements. Well, let me tell you, this is ripe for serious manipulation. All you can do is get the customer to react to your designs. You need to read the Barry Feig books for more discussion on this.
However, I will use their quantitative approach in my next product development quest, realizing that it may get messed up a little. I really liked their discussion of how to do questionaires (the Kano method was terrific).
I thought their discussion of developing customer images was also great, but I got the feeling that this was not the author's forte, as this was more intuitive type of thing. Regardless, this was valable to me and I'm glad they included this in the book.
Perhaps most important to me was their confirmation that the biggest reason for missing the customer's desires... was FAILURE TO PROBE. I wholeheartedly agree. That's one of the reasons I laugh when I see the mall interviewers asking all those closed-questions. The author does a great job of discussion this.
The author, Sheila Mello, passes my test for a business author: she is a consultant in the field. This is not a book by some college professor preaching his hands-off theories.
There was a lot that I agreed with in this book, and there was a lot of important ideas that I picked up, and will implement next time. I recommend that this book be read before the Feig and Hall books to provide you a base foundation for your approach.
Highly recomended book, if not MUST READ.
John Dunbar
Sugar Land, TX
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A really useful book, essential product development reading, February 28, 2002
If your product isn't geared to the customer, how do you expect to sell it?
If you don't know how to design to customer specs, how do you start? And...is the customer ALWAYS right? Maybe you have to be one step ahead of them and surprise, delight and challenge them.
You will find the answers to these questions and some very helpful processes in "Customer-centric Product Definition." And it doesn't matter if you are designing a cake pan, a high-tech gadget or a chemical product, the principles all apply.
There is a very helpful chapter on establishing metrics, because if you can't measure it, you don't know about it. Other chapters make the case for customer-centric design and list techniques such as customer visits (with structure to get what you need), internal processes and much, much more.
A must-read.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It is the Key!!!, December 8, 2001
Customer Centric Product Definition is a terrific book! It defines the steps necessary for achieving successful product development, which starts at the beginning with the definition of the product. The company case histories included illuminates the absolute necessity to follow a rigorous and robust product definition process as developed by Sheila Mello. I have been in the product development area throughout my entire career and this is the first time, a thorough and documented process for demystifying the "fuzzy", but crucial front-end of product development has been offered. Unlike many books written on product development it does not just pay lip service to identifying the crucially important needs of the customer. I came away with a blueprint, something I could immediately use, for defining products from the customers perspective and identify both stated and latent customer requirements. I highly recommend it for anyone involved in the product development process. It should be "must" reading for all business executives for understanding the necessity of clearly getting this phase of product development - right. Two thumbs up to Sheila!
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