NPD Phase 1: Research & Validation
In my first article, How to Champion Your Ideation Phase, I stated that ideation is a very crucial part of product development — or we can start using NPD (the acronym for New Product Development). However, I have not exactly discussed which phase of the NPD process ideation is involved. Generally, organizations discuss ideas (could be business problems or opportunities/reasons to improve their products) at the very beginning of the NPD process.
Product School introduced the “10-step product development (NPD) process” developed by Valentine Aseyo from Bransintown, who has brought many great products to life and has similar experience at Facebook, IBM, and Colgate-Palmolive. Before the first step of NPD, Valentine states that Phase Zero should be ideation. This is where teamwork on collecting ideas (collective intelligence) must be golden.
For my upcoming articles, I would like to focus on each of the 10 steps defined by Valentine after ideation, however for readability, I will rather bucket them into the six following larger categories:
1. Research & Validation
2. Roadmap Planning
3. Design
4. Technical Implementation
5. Dogfooding
6. Launch & Post-Launch
Now, bear in mind that different companies design their product development process slightly differently. To get their products to market as quickly as possible, some companies may skip one or two steps, or go through different steps simultaneously. You may refer to the less formal and structured Fuzzy Front End (FFE) approach in this Cleverism article.
1. Research & Validation
Once your team has come up with product ideas to prioritize, you need to make sure that they are the solutions to the problems the market needs you to solve and not the solutions the market doesn’t care about.
That solution to the critical problem needs to be tested before you proceed to developing it. How? You must collect as many data points as possible through the following methods:
Market research (External)
As a starting point of your research, you should find out what has been done in the area your product is getting into, and learn from others’ mistakes and experiences. This is echoing the “market readiness assessment” part of my first article.
You may find external data points, studies, research papers and stats which would help you build your reasoning behind why you should pursue the design and development of the product or why you shouldn’t.
You may find research reports and stats portal such as Financial Times, Pew Research Center, eMarketer, and Statista to understand market trends and demographics as well as tools such as Google Trends and SocialMention to understand the implications of what people are interested in nowadays. The consulting firms such as Deloitte, McKinsey, PwC and EY produce latest consumer and business customer insights.
Competitive analysis
As much as you need to learn about the industry landscape through external market research, you need to understand how your target audience is engaging with your competitors and figure out how you can do it differently and better.
There are many frameworks you can consider to conduct analysis such as Porter’s Five Forces, PESTLE, and Industry Lifecycle and SWOT. And all of these frameworks may still be used in many small and large companies, however there are tools such as SEMRush, Brandwatch or even Instagram hashtag search that could get you the necessary competitor info you need.
Focus group
Empathy is a core competency of a Product Manager. You should have focus groups help you put yourself in your customers’ shoes. When you hear focus groups, you may think that they need to be in a group setting where you watch them behind a mirrored glass. But they don’t necessarily have to be! You can simply just ask questions in an informal manner. You should also interview your colleagues. Sync with the Sales team that is the bridge between you and your customers because they can give you more ideas around your existing end customers from the Sales point of view.
Interview
During your interview sessions with potential or existing customers, you may a set of questions and discuss answers to understand candid customer voices. As interviews can help you tackle complex issues and get touch questions answered, specific training may be required to become an interviewer.
Survey
Through cost effective surveys, you may get some valuable insights from your potential or existing customers. However, the response rate is known compare to other research methods. You may use tools such as Survey Monkey, Google Forms — and even more intuitive and attractive — Typeform.
Suggestions
This may only be applicable if your aim is to “improve your existing product”, and not build a new product from scratch. However the client, customer or employee feedback can be received and treated as suggestions to improve your product. However suggestions should only be perceived as an added value to support your consideration for product improvement as they do not look at overall process of the development or necessarily represent the needs of a larger customer group.
Observations
Lastly, during the entire development process, any individuals involved should be able to observe and provide feedback to the process which does act as a Voice of Customer (e.g., focusing too much on your organizational goals).
Six Sigma & Voice of Customer
In Six Sigma, the last five methods (focus group, interview, survey, suggestions and observations) are actually widely-known to represent Voice of Customer (VOC) methods — to capture the customer’s true voice, expectations, preferences, comments, of a product or service (essentially a customer feedback). Customer insights from these VOC methods will help you translate verbatim comments (customer voices) into what customers are implying that they need (customer needs), and needs into required outputs of a product or service (customer requirements). The examples are explained in the table below.
Six Sigma is a disciplined, statistical-based, data-driven approach and continuous improvement methodology for eliminating defects in a product, process or service. It was developed by Motorola and Bill Smith in the early 1980’s based on quality management fundamentals. (Source: Six Sigma Institute)
Based on all these data points you gathered, you can create strong enough hypotheses to build a detailed roadmap — and later on — develop an implementable killer design concept. If you are not confident after you learn about the market, kill that idea and move on.
In the next article, I will dig deep into what the “Roadmap planning” phase entails and the industry best practices that may have helped many organizations get through this stage successfully.
Source:
https://www.cleverism.com/product-development-overview-idea-product/
