LINKING MARKET TO PRODUCT DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT

HOUSE OF QUALITY AND NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Reading 1: The House of Quality

 Products should be designed to reflect what the customer needs and hence marketers who understand customer
needs, design engineers and manufacturers must work together to make the product.
 House of quality provides a conceptual map for planning and communicating between the various functions
involved (marketing, design and manufacturing).
 Consumers can mean multiple things when they look for quality in a product. It is not possible to satisfy all that the
consumers want. Hence, customer experience feedback should be constantly taken, and this should be
communicated with the engineers so that they can build products that meets customer expectations.
 The needs of the customers can be referred to as customer attributes (CAs). While designing a product, the CAs
need to be considered and different weightage should be given to CAs since some attributes are considered more
important than others by the customers.
 By looking at how the consumers’ view our competitors’ products solve the CAs against ours, we can find out areas
which are not explored by others and use it to our advantage by providing it, as well as use our strong areas to
position the brand.
 Each engineering change of product will lead to affecting the CA in either positive or negative way. The factors
which the engineering team changes are engineering characteristics (ECs). We must perform those ECs which has
a strong positive impact on meeting CAs.
 For a CA, we must identify the EC which will affect it and for that EC, we must objectively measure how customers
view our competitors’ products and based on that, we must set the targets for our changes.
 Understanding House of Quality helps people to think in right direction and thinking together.

Reading 2: Steve Jobs: Chapter 12 – The Design

 “God is in the details” and “Less is More” – Similar to the maxims, the design of products should be clear and
expressive. Jobs ensured that Apple’s products were clean and simple, and followed the idea “Simplicity is the
ultimate sophistication”.
 The products should be made easy to use. It should be intuitively obvious to the user on how to use the product.
 The calligraphy class Jobs audited at Reed inspired him to develop different fonts for the Mac. Something which he
learned came back to him during font designing and he connected the dots to make it successful.
 Careful design should be done even to parts which are hidden away from consumers’ normal view.
 Consumers judge a book by its cover and hence the product packaging must be made appealing.
 Work should be done with passion with a playful / whimsical attitude at times because only when we treat our
products with passion, do they turn out to be like art that gets liked and admired.

Reading 3: Steve Jobs: Chapter 26 – Design Principles

 The aim of an organization is not to chase after profits, but to focus on making great products. This will lead to
decisions which will transform the product designs.
 “Less but better” and “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” – Jobs believed that simplicity came from
understanding the complexities clearly and coming up with elegant solutions rather than ignoring them.
 For making an elegant product, we should understand the functioning of its parts in depth and then remove the
non-essential parts.
 Design of a product is not just in how it looks but is based on how it functioned within.