21 Great Questions for Developing New Products

Here are 21 great questions for developing new products, the checklist is from “Breakthrough Thinking From Inside the Box” by Coyne, Clifford, and Dye; the commentary is mine.

21 Great Questions for Developing New Products

Taken from “Breakthrough Thinking From Inside the Box” by Kevin Coyne, Patricia Gorman Clifford, and Renee Dye in the December 2007 Harvard Business Review. You can skip the article if you are looking for additional insights or elaborations on these very useful questions; it’s an attack on the brainstorming process as practiced by large corporations and not relevant for startups. I have numbered the questions to make reference easier.

1. Which customers use or purchase our product in the most unusual way?
Understand that “unusual” is from your perspective, not theirs; from their perspective, they are using it naturally. Resist the temptation to tell them, “you’re using my product wrong!” or attempt to snatch it back out of their hands and instead explore how you might make it even more fit for this “unusual use.”

2. Do any customers need vastly more or less sales and service attention than most.
It’s typically visionary customers who need vastly less sales and service attention (in fact, with visionaries, it’s frequently the case that the product is bought, not sold). Alas, one of the key characteristics of visionary customers is their scarcity. Customers who need more sales and service support are typically normal; it’s your sales process, marketing message, product documentation, and training materials that frequently need improvement. I’ve met a number of startups over the years who, in effect, administer an IQ test to prospects (“Let’s see if you can figure out what this is good for and how to use it”) and console themselves with the thought that “our product is not for everyone” or “we need to find smarter prospects.”

3. For which customers are our support costs (e.g. order entry, tracking, customer specific design) either unusually high or low?
Winston Churchill observed that “we shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us.” The same can be true of a startup’s systems. What you are uncovering with this question, especially if you look at the trend over time of when they were acquired, is how suitable your assumptions about your engagement model are for current and likely customers.

4. Could we still meet the needs of a significant subset of customers if we stripped 25% of the hard or soft costs out of our products?
For software, this is primarily about what features can be deleted. For a startup that has built a “Swiss Army Chainsaw,” figuring out the key two or three blades to focus on can be a source of great success as it can increase quality (much less unnecessary functionality to debug and maintain) and lower barriers to adoption by virtue of a simpler interface.

5. Who spends at least 50% of what our product costs to adapt it to their specific needs?
If you can figure out what features to add or delete or which of your customer-facing processes to change, you can either increase the price (since you are lowering their effective cost) or see a large increase in usage. Adding more end-user programmability to interfaces and functionality can also lower the customer’s adoption cost.

6. Who uses our product in ways that we never expected or intended?
This is a variation on #1

7. Who uses our product in surprisingly large quantities?
Quantity of use can be assessed in several ways for software. A mix of instrumentation and customer interviews can help you analyze the impact of your product on their business. When your customers produce standard reports, forms, certifications, or other transactions, you can ask for or measure the output volume per person. Be careful of relying just on the time spent in the system or the number of mouse clicks or keystrokes. These are input measures, not results the customer is paying for.

8. What other firms are dealing with the same generic problem as we are but for an entirely different reason? How have they addressed it?
A systematic lateral exploration will often help you spot incipient or emerging competitors as well as potential partners or suppliers.

9. What major breakthroughs in efficiency or effectiveness have we made in our business that could be applied in another industry?
I would be a little cautious with this unless you have folks on your team from that industry or customers with operating experience in the industry. Be careful of a “grass is greener on the other side of the fence” based on unfounded speculation. It’s possible to achieve a strategic advantage by moving laterally into another industry once your technology is proven, but ignorance of the details of that industry can also blind you to the unsuitability of your offering.

10. What information about customers and product use is created as a by-product of our business that could be the key to radically improving the economics of another business.
I think this is unethical if it involves sharing customer information without permission. But if your customer intimacy allows you to recommend relevant solutions from other firms that your customers would welcome, then it’s clearly a basis for partnering.

11. What is the biggest hassle of purchasing or using or product?
One source of friction and dissatisfaction that’s frequently overlooked is the time for a new customer to become operational. If you are competing against larger firms that measure installation and bring-up in seasons (i.e., all new purchases have bring-up schedules of at least 90 days), see if you can get a customer functional in less than five working days.

A prospect will include foreseeable hassles in their total cost of ownership, impacting the price you can charge. If they have to allocate several of their best people for two months to get your product deployed and operational, they will include the opportunity cost of that talent in your price. Note that the opportunity cost is typically a multiple of the salary and overhead expenses for the employee.

I remember walking through the bring-up history of several customers of a complex product for one startup’s offering and telling the CEO he had a product he could charge $250K for. Needless to say, he didn’t believe me and told me he was only able to charge $60K. I explained that by requiring extremely talented engineers to work for several months to get his product operational, he was imposing a substantial opportunity cost given what else a customer could achieve with that same expertise. He could charge a lot more if he could dramatically reduce the time and effort it took a new customer to become fully operational.

12. What are some examples of ad hoc modifications that customers have made with our product.
This is actually a very good probe question to discern latent or unspoken feature requests.

13. For which current customers is our product least suited and why?
This is a variation on #11 and #12.

14. For what particular occasions is our product least suited?
This is a reframing of #11 and #12.

15. Which customers does our industry prefer not to serve and why?
The two defaults are the least skilled and the ones who pay the least. Clayton Christensen advises in the Innovator’s Dilemma that these two groups are the most likely foothold for a disruptive competitor in your market.

16. Which customers could be major users, if only we could remove one specific barrier that we’ve never previously considered?
You should be able to find example cases or indications in your answers to #6, #11, #12, and #13. If you have no customers of that type who are minor users it’s unlikely the category would go from non-users to major users.

17. How would we do things differently if we had perfect information about our buyers, usage, distribution channels, etc..
The other question you always have to ask when considering “perfect information” is “what is the value of perfect information?” There is an upper bound on how much extra customers will pay and how much unmet demand actually exists. Typically the more thoroughly you solve one problem for a customer the more you promote the next constraint as the one they become more willing to pay to solve.

18. How would our product change if we tailored it for every customer?
This is a variant on #17, What Component Technologies in Our Products and Process are Most Likely To Be Obsolete?

19. Which technologies embedded in our product have changed the most since the product was last redesigned?
For software this would include assumptions about available memory, processor power, disk space and access, how the customer will interact and access outputs (e.g. moving beyond printouts to web pages to mobile devices). What key assumptions are built into your architectural trade-off analysis that may need to be revisited?

20. Which technologies underlying our production process have changed the most since we last rebuilt our manufacturing and distribution systems.
Another way to frame this is what key assumptions are built into your development processes.

21. Which customers’ needs are shifting more rapidly? What will they be in five years?
Not only needs but demographics. What trends can be discerned in the economic forces acting on your customers and the ecology of your partner and supplier ecosystem?

I Think These are Great Questions for Developing New Products

I hope you find these questions helpful. The main thing to take away is that customer intimacy is a significant source of innovative insight. Always involve anyone on your team working closely with customers or prospects to craft product plans. Encourage your engineering staff to have regular customer contact; don’t have them work in isolation or only through sales, support, and marketing intermediaries. Look at adjacent industries for component technologies and methodologies to apply to your current market. Objectively assessing the total cost to acquire and own your solution and any attendant delays and/or risks you impose on your customers is a good place to hunt for opportunities to add value to your product.

Related Blog Posts

• First Seven Questions Any New Product Plan Should Address
• Tom Van Vleck’s Three Questions Complement Root Cause Analysis (5 Whys)
• 40 Tips for B2B Customer Development Interviews
• The Best Way to Get Feedback from Early Customers is a Conversation
• The Best Feedback from Your Early Customers is a Story

This post was republished on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/21-great-questions-developing-new-products-sean-murphy-wgznc/