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Needs Analysis Part 1: Rating Products by Needs

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

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.

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