Easy to say, hard to do, in any competitive environment. Aside from the commonplace answers of “staying close to customers” and “anticipating the market,” just how DO you build an enduring product? We came up with a few common themes that have driven our more successful product technologies:
Lesson: Listening is hard. Learn how to do it well.
Product development at times seems to be a black art. Perhaps that explains the tremendous number of annual product launches that fail. But at its core, uncovering true opportunity resides on understanding what the customer says, and doesn’t say. The unarticulated need is often the difference between understanding the difference between features that are “nice to have” versus “have to have.” Teaching your marketers and engineers how to ask questions, and pull true insights from customer conversations, lies at the core of creating real value in product development. The psychology of questioning is vitally important to understand. For instance, “what else” will elicit far more than “is there anything else?” Very subtle, but very powerful. Or, one of our marketers loved the question, “what problem does that solve?” He felt that simple query yielded a treasure trove of creative insights.
Of course, we do the typical steps of customer visits, visiting trade shows and conferences. We’re always searching for the new application for our products that can yield to new solutions. One method we’ve used is Google Scholar, which we’ve found to be a powerful scanning tool to uncover ideas we may not hear of otherwise. For instance, during the last decade, we’ve learned researchers far outside the semiconductor lab are using the Model 4200-SCS in some astonishing ways. Just by searching for “Keithley 4200” using Google Scholar, we’re constantly discovering the results of research in technologies that simply didn’t exist when the system was introduced.
