We Focus On The Wrong Goals During New Product Development
We make a mistake by focusing on developing high-quality products. The real goal should be to drive growth with profitable new products. When this is your goal, it fundamentally transforms how you approach new product development.
For example, most entrepreneurs come up with genuinely good ideas and then channel their energy into making a quality product. Sounds great, right? But what if we started with empathy instead of inspiration? What if we put customers at the center of product development from the very beginning instead of our product?
When we have a customer-centric approach to new product development, we are more aware of the entire customer journey from their initial awareness of our product to becoming a brand evangelist. This helps us identify new ways to innovate that happen before and after a customer purchases our product that our competitors are totally oblivious to.
For example, during product development, Nest thermostat watched real customers install their thermostats. They found that it took people about 20 minutes to install the thermostat. That’s a success, right? They didn’t think so. It took people 30 - 40 minutes and multiple trips to the garage and junk drawer to find the various tools they needed to do the installation. The total time was closer to an hour.
So, Nest created a cool little screwdriver with multiple attachments that could handle the removal of the old thermostat and installing a new Nest thermostat. They put it in the box so customers had everything they needed for an easy installation.
It cost them $1.50, but it completely changed the customer experience. This created an obscene amount of free press and word-of-mouth for the company, which translated into massive sales momentum for them. They did it by falling in love with their customer and not their product.
