don't get blind by blind test -innovate from real customer insight

Couple years ago, one of the product manager in my previous company approached the team with a product feature proposal for the Laserjet printer – ID copy feature. It was really a tough discussion because he insisted that this new feature will be a hit as he got feedback from many customers, and our competitor already included this cool feature. But it’s an engineering challenge to implement, what’s more, no one really understand what this new feature is going to significantly add value to customer, therefore set us apart from our competitor. So the proposal was rejected.

But as we launched more products into this new channel and as we listened to more customers, we hear similar request keep coming, such as request for smaller footprint, lower power consumption, noise free, once we put them together, we gradually see a connection behind, customer is expecting a personal, intimate consumer printer, something a huge box sitting on the office floor with a lot of sophiscated functions which people never use can’t satisfy. We start to realize the real challenge –this is not just about a cool feature, as we just reposition these commercial based products into consumer channel, our product design concept is not perfectly aligned with customer expectation.

Based on these findings, we engaged with the customer to understand what they are looking for from a personal printer. Speed and durability are good to have, but other aspects such as simplicity, nice touch-and-feel loom in front of us as more seemingly appealing characteristics. Once we understand what is customer trying to achieve as a outcome instead of solution, the team not only reacted to these new requests more effectively, but also started to come up with very creative products hit on these points even sometimes customer hasn’t articulated yet.

Listen to customer requires the ability to get behind the seemingly trivial dots and start to form the line and plane. If we simply follow the customer passively, we can easily lose the sight of bigger picture therefore lose the opportunity to generate killer product.

But the other side of the story is that although our competitor is very good at coming up with new features which customer specifically request, it’s very interesting to find when it comes to purchase decision; our products are still the top choice. As the dominant leader in the commercial market over decades, our printers already established itself as the synonymous of premium quality, reliability and elegance, this ingrained underlying image is normally something customer won’t tell during an interview. However, when it comes to a still non-trivial home investment, they make the choice independent to what they say. Actually our company conservative innovation approach put us in a better position as customer sometimes perceive the overwhelming amount of incremental new features as a sign of quality trade off and a desperate move by the losing company. So our product’s classical white color and simple user interface give customer the sense of consistency and elegancy; the relatively bigger size imply good quality and durability, when customer make a decision, they un-consciously transfer the sensation into the overall product experience, but they think it’s all about product itself, to this sense, a printer is not that different than a cola.