The Product Vision blog

Needs Analysis Part 1: Rating Products by Needs

Friday, November 21st, 2008 | Uncategorized, product vision, vision book | 4 Comments

In the last installment I used the example of the the Toyota Prius to demonstrate how the heart of a product can be expressed in terms of the problems it solves for customers, rather than by its features, design technologies.  Put another way, we can see beyond the surface by focusing on a product’s needs profile — which set of needs it addresses, and to what degree.

Now I’d like to take it a step forward and show how to rate and visualize those needs.  This will help to formalize our needs analysis, laying down another stepping stone in our quest for a systematic way to approach product vision.

Grading how well each need is addressed

Whether a need is addressed is not a black and white thing.  A product might do well on some needs, poorly on others, and in-between on others.  We can grade each need numerically.  I prefer to use a limited scale of 0 to 3, which makes assigning a value easy and avoids splitting hairs:

• 0 – The product does not attempt to address the need.
• 1 – The product addresses the need at a basic level.
• 2 – The product does a decent job of addressing the need, but there is still room for improvement.
• 3 – The product fully satisfies the customer need, or the product is significantly ahead of the competition in doing so.

Needs Profile of the Prius

When discussing the Prius I spoke loosely of several customer needs: the needs for comfort, safety, fuel economy, and so on.  Let’s now enumerate and rate each one relative to other mid-size sedans and efficient vehicles that would serve as comparison points for a customer considering a Prius.

• Need for comfort – The Prius is surprisingly comfortable, but it’s not a luxury car.  So let’s give it a 2 for comfort and reserve the 3 for the more cushy rides.
• Need for performance – The Prius has plenty of power to climb hills and pass, but it’s not a performance automobile.  We’ll give it a 2 out of 3.
• Need for safety – It’s got a full compliment of safety features so we’ll give a 3.
• Need for long range – The Prius’s range is excellent for a sedan, so it gets a 3.
• Need for low fuel cost – Compared with regular sedans, the Prius has excellent fuel economy, so we’ll give it a 3.
• Need for eco-friendliness – It’s rated as a Super Ultra Low Emissions Vehicle (SULEV), so it gets 3 on need for eco-friendliness.
• Need for distinctive styling -The Prius stands out among sedans, but it’s not showy.  We’ll give it a 2. (And we’ll say more about aesthetics later.)
• Need for passenger capacity – The Prius comfortably sits five people.  We’ll give it a full 3 for passenger capacity.  (If we included minivans in the comparison set we’d have to give the Prius only a 2.)
  
• Need for cargo capacity – the Prius has a large trunk and fold down back seats.  Quite good for a sedan, so we’ll give it 3 for cargo capacity.
• Need for ease of learning and use – Part of the Prius’s appeal is that it operates like any regular car.   Unlike some alternative fuel vehicles, it requires no special training or change of habits.  We’ll give it 3 for learnability and usability.
• Need for refueling convenience – With an electric car, you better make sure you’re near an outlet at the end of the day.  The Prius, on the other hand, is gassed up like any other car at any gas station. We’ll give it a 3 for refueling convenience.
• Need for low initial costs – The sophisticated new engine on the Prius adds a couple of thousand dollars to the sticker price.  We’ll give it a 1 for low initial cost.
• Need for low maintenance cost – More sophisticated cars require special training on the part of car shops, and are therefore more expensive to repair.  We’ll assign the Prius a 1.

We can now visualize these values in a table:

This is the needs profile of the Toyota Prius. The set of dimensions along the top is called the needs space and it will serve as the basis for comparison between products.

Notice that needs are always expressed in the positive. Bigger and darker numbers are always better.  Standardizing on this scale makes it easy to read the table and make comparisons.

What’s going on here?

Thinking of a product in terms of its needs profile forces us to think at a higher conceptual level.  for the Prius, we see beyond the details of its hybrid engine technology, funky styling and other features to the relevance those features have to the customer at the end of the day.  The needs viewpoint is intrinsically customer-centric.  When thinking needs, we can’t help but think of our product from the viewpoint of the people whom we want to have buy it.

The needs profile is a much more manageable way of understanding a product.  Thousands of minute variables are synthesized down into a reasonable set of dimensions that we can wrap our head around.

Using needs for our dimensions is not arbitrary.  We don’t just make up the needs.  Needs ultimately come from customers in particular situations (see SSNiF Analysis). The features of the Prius or any other product can be traced to specific needs that fall out of specific situations that are experienced by a specific set of customers (or stakeholders).  Even a feature as minute as a wide cupholder is traceable to a situation (buying Big Gulp at the drive-thru) and a resulting need (to put it down somewhere stable while traveling in a moving vehicle).  Because needs are always traceable to SSNiFs they are less arbitrary and more reliability.

We now have a the beginnings of a new conceptual model for dealing with product vision.  I call this approach to looking at products (and soon, customers), Formal Needs Analysis.  Things get more interesting when we use the same basis of needs to compare products, so let’s do that next.

See also

• Choosing the Right Problem to Solve
• Other examples of needs analysis: Reusable shopping bags | Moviegoing
• SSNiF analysis (Modeling scenarios in terms of Stakeholders, Situations and Needs, and connecting them to Features)

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Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

Tags: needs analysis

Choosing the right problem to solve

Thursday, November 13th, 2008 | product vision, vision book | 4 Comments

Product vision can seem impenetrable. How did the breakthrough products in the Product Vision Hall of Fame manage to achieve something so much more advanced than the competition?  It is mysterious when we look at products at a surface level.  But things start to make sense when we shift our focus from the how we solve problems, to the choice of which problems to solve.

Normally when we look at any product, we see the tangible and concrete: the features, design, and technologies.  This is natural.  But it’s important to recognize that these things exist for a purpose, which is to solve a problem for someone.  When we scratch past the surface, we see that it’s this selection of the problem, not how it’s solved, that determines so much of a product’s fate.

When we look at the breakthrough products, we see that they didn’t merely do a better job of addressing the same customer needs.  They chose a a different set of needs.  And when we look at the spectacular failures, we find that the problems that they chose to solve were not especially important to customers.  Envisioning great products is about choosing the right set of problems to solve.

Deconstructing the problem

We can always take a product and look beyond its surface to figure out what problems it is endeavoring to solve.  A corkscrew solves the problem of removing a cork from a bottle. A hammer and nails solves the problem of fastening large things together.

For a more sophisticated product, we can trace each individual feature to specific problems. Let’s take one of the Product Vision Hall of Fame, the Toyota Prius.

Looking at the distinguishing features of the Prius, we see a funky looking car that operates and performs like any other sedan, except that it has a a hybrid gas-electric engine.  Each of these key features exists to address some customer need:

• The hybrid engine saves fuel, which addresses the problem of high gas costs.  Phrased in terms of needs, we can say that it addresses the customer’s need for fuel economy.
• The hybrid engine helps to qualify the Prius as a Super-Ultra Low Emissions Vehicle.  This help address the problem of greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. It helps address the customer need to minimize the impact on the environment, or, for brevity, the need for eco-friendliness.
• The fact that the Prius drives like any other car solves the customer’s needs for comfort, safety, performance and range.  The driving experience is not compromised for the sake of economy, unlike earlier efficient vehicles.
• The Prius is operated like any other vehicle: gas it up, step on the pedal, and go.  It does not require the driver to learn any new skills or change any habits,  Electric cars have a limited range and require that the driver plan out where the next charge will come from.  The Prius solves the customer need for ease of learning and, shall we say, the need for refueling convenience.
• 

  2010 Honda Insight

  What need is served by the Prius’s unusual styling?  To achieve it’s high mileage rating, Toyota was impelled by the laws of aerodynamics to deviate from the current fashion in automobile styling.  The weird body shape helped address the need for fuel economy.  But it also advanced Toyota’s need to have a distinctive automobile that stood out and declared to the world a new era in cars had arrived.  Now, several years after the Prius’s North American introduction, the body shape is iconic and is even being copied by Honda with the 2010 Insight.

• The funky body styling turns out to address a second customer need as well. According to the New York Times:

..more than half of the Prius buyers surveyed [..] said the main reason they purchased their car was that “it makes a statement about me.  [..] “I really want people to know that I care about the environment,” said Joy Feasley of Philadelphia, owner of a green 2006 Prius. “I like that people stop and ask me how I like my car.”

So it turns out that many customers had a couple of ulterior motives for buying a Prius: to make a personal statement, and to influence others into thinking about the environment and making progressive choices, too. The unusual body styling helped address these needs.

Making Trade-offs

Nothing comes for free in product design.  There are always trade-offs to be made.  And so it goes with product vision.  In the case of the Prius, the more complex engine and batteries come with a higher initial price, and possibly greater maintenance costs.

This set of trade-offs, with some needs addressed well and others addressed less well or not at all is what I call the product’s needs profile.  It is the blueprint of the product’s vision.

The Prius has a fundamentally different product vision, because its needs profile is unique.  None of the predecessors make the same set of trade-offs. Regular sedans are comfortable and safe, but do not address the need for fuel economy as well. Small cars address the need for fuel-efficiency but not the needs for space and comfort. Early electric vehicles like the Ford EV1 were extremely efficient, but sacrificed internal passenger and cargo capacity, performance, range and refueling convenience.  Each comparison point makes a different balance of trade-offs and has a different  needs profile.

This will be a central theme in our study of product vision.  Sculpting the needs profile of future products will be a key tool in our arsenal for defining breakthrough products.

Try this at home

You can try this exercise of deconstructing products by needs yourself.  Pick up any simple product around you like a mechanical pencil or your coffee mug.  First ask yourself, what features or design elements or technologies make it unique among its peers?  Then ask, what problem does each feature solve that the others do not?  Then try and express the problem in terms of a customer need as I did for the Prius.

When you start to get good at this, you will develop an x-ray vision that lets you see past a product’s superficial skin to its essence and the reason that it exists. This is a core perspective for doing product vision work.

To summarize, envisioning great products is not about solving problems better, but choosing the right problems to solve.  Choose the wrong problems and your product will be doomed before the project begins.  Choose the right set of problems and you have the blueprint for a breakthrough product

See also:

• Picking a frame: Activities vs. Goals vs. Needs needs
• The First Rule of Product Vision
• Introduction to SSNiF Analysis

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Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

Tags: book, examples, product vision