The Role of Feedback in Product Innovation
Posted by Scott Blacker on Tue, Mar 29, 2011
While it’s true that some companies build inspired products based on engineering genius, many of those products ultimately fail due to their inability to solve a real market problem (when was the last time you saw a Segway zipping down the street?). By ensuring that you’re listening to key external stakeholders in your space (customers, prospects, thought leaders, etc…), you can avoid costly blunders and ensure that your product roadmap wows customers, builds new revenue channels and renders the competition obsolete.
At Vovici, we’re laser-focused on helping companies better understand their customers. We recently partnered with Steve Johnson from Pragmatic Marketing to host a webinar on The Role of Feedback in Product Innovation. Steve is an industry expert on launching innovative, market-driven products, and together we explored the research lifecycle and discussed how different forms of feedback can be used at different stages of the research process. The following chart outlines the research lifecycle:
If your goal truly is innovation (and not incremental change), starting with a blank slate and no pre-conceived notions of what your end product will be is a great way to start. Focus groups, on-line communities and 1:1 interviews enable you to have broad-ranging, exploratory, open-ended conversations.
Once you have a framework for problems or ideas that specific individuals are recommending you tackle, it’s time to ensure that those issues are representative of the broader market, or you’ll wind up building a product for a market of one. Surveys are by far the best tool for quantitative market research. Take the best ideas from your qualitative research, incorporate them in a survey, and solicit feedback from a broad range of stakeholders. Depending on the nature of your innovation, it may be appropriate to survey end users, buyers, administrators, prospects, recently lost prospects, or a random sample of your target population.
One key component of your survey (or an activity do to after collecting the results of your survey), is to put “choice models” in place that force constituents to choose between a variety of options. This force ranking (whether it be through rank-order questions, MaxDiff scaling, conjoint analysis, A/B testing or some other method) will help you prioritize the variety of ideas you’re hearing and focus on the right idea first.
Finally, after you’ve landed on a key concept or innovation that you want to focus on, start experimenting. Mock up some screen shots or build a prototype that you can put in front of customers or your target audience. If you’ve done your homework, you can circle back to the same audience or online community you initially solicited ideas from to validate that your proposed solution truly does solve their original problem.
We follow this research lifecycle all of the time at Vovici with customers, prospects and key thought leaders in our space. Central to our customer outreach program is our Product Advisory Council, which offers us direct, immediate insight into the minds of hundreds of our most active customers. If you’re interested in learning about our Advisory Council or about how we leverage feedback to innovate on our own platform, please contact me at sblacker@vovici.com.
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