Where does VoC fit in the product development process?
If you ask a typical product manager or business owner where VoC is used within their development process, they will typically highlight the following two key areas:
- Idea generation: Interacting with customers through interviews, as well as focus groups, to determine customer-generic needs and problems, and actively soliciting ideas from innovative and lead users during what is often referred to as the fuzzy front end (FFE) stage.
- Design phase of the product: Determining customer and user requirements with a user needs-and-wants study. Typically, this entails interviewing and listening to the customer or user to understand his/her problems and to determine both articulated and unarticulated needs, wants, and desires.
While this is not incorrect, customer input should not stop at the completion of the ideation or predevelopment market study phases of the project, but rather the customer input needs to be incorporated at all phases of the...
