I flipped open a recent issue of Motorcyclist magazine and found a great piece about a new Kawasaki owner who was asked for an interview about his new Ninja H2 (a truly remarkable machine). To his surprise, the whole Japan-based Kawasaki design team then rolled up in a van to have an in-depth conversation with him.
By putting the design team on the road, Kawasaki is getting valuable unfiltered data they will immediately use to drive their design iterations.
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I was recently reminded of the significance of this. Having just completed a few diagnostic workshops, I saw how easy it is for incumbent teams to overlook opportunities their current distribution channel is serving with a product that meets a customer’s general needs, but does not delight them. This is common with larger organizations that have allowed customer avatars – or specific knowledge of their customers – to get blurred, and assume their broad spectrum product is meeting the needs of everyone well.
This opens the doors for niche players to carve off potentially high margin business opportunities and develop strong customer relationships in plain sight, while the market leader’s metrics don’t pick it up until it’s a big issue.
In the case of the H2, niche players like Ducati have been slicing off portions of the mainstream road bikes’ high-margin business for quite some time. With pricing >100% higher than the volume machines, this niche drives a lot of margin and brand cache.
Putting engineers in the field in well-designed learning environments goes a long way toward ensuring nothing gets lost in the usual research processes, even with many handoffs. By having direct contact, nothing gets lost in the interfaces.
Consider the following examples:
A software team that does quarterly updates to mission critical communications systems cannot understand why the upgrade process always goes badly. They review the data logs and find out the team consistently makes wrong choices when prompted for information during the upgrade process. When the software engineers went to the field for an upgrade, they discover they were calling for a high level of decision making at 4am, a notoriously poor cognitive time for people who don’t usually function on 3rd shift.
A radio design team gets complaints from the teams installing their products for traffic signal communications. A team goes along for a shift in the bucket truck, and quickly realizes that the same hardware that works well in the controlled environment of a telecom radio shack is a poor match when riding in the bucket and working with leather gloves.
Each of the above examples enabled changes that resulted in products that had a high level of preference and commanded premium prices in their category. Not bad for a one-time investment to do the work of getting into the field and getting the real info.
So what are some actions you can take to steer your team into finding these opportunities?
- Be inquisitive and always be on the lookout for the unexpected (teach your team to do the same). I guarantee you that your group is getting requests for applications that don’t quite fit all the time. Train your team to find out more. Find out what they are going to use your product for, what value it will bring, and what else they have tried. You will be surprised at how many times you’ll find a passionate new customer this way.
- Block time to get into the field, and not just at your best customers that the sales guys want to take you too. Do some original research off the beaten path. Ask for a list of your lowest volume customers and pick three of them to have a face-to-face conversation with.
- Go and See. The richest source of information is always the first-person observation. Whenever we start with a second-hand set of observations, bias is introduced – no matter how skilled the observer. The bias will remove the possibility of finding some of the rich opportunities described in the example above.
My work takes me all over the world to apply the Right Project, Right Team, Right Plan Framework to help firms make strong plans for growth. If you’d like to discuss doing a one-day diagnostic session with me on your particular project or program, please reach out to me at 847-651-1014 or send me an email.
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