Jerk and New Product Development

Posted in August 19th, 2004

One of the commenters on Andrew Ankers blog brought to light an interesting concept. The derivative of acceleration is jerk, something learned way back when in high school physics classes. He also stated that marketers not engineers are in control, and jerk will increase as product development becomes more customer centric. Responding to fluctuating customer demand is a good thing. The challenge we have is to put processes in place to do so.

I saw 2 potential product failures this week. It was almost as if the products were designed on the moon. The desginers apparently did little or no consumer application testing. I wonder if by chance, they were planning on accelerating accelration so quickly, they forgot to get consumer input.

One went down the path thinking that foreboding warnings nn the manual would make up for possible mis-applications. Whoa, they missed the application path. If one follows their warnings, the product cannot be used. The analogy would be to build a new refrigerator, but then in the manual state that you could not place food in it. Sure there are markets for non-food refrigerators, but, you don’t market those to the consumer who wants a fridge. This outfit chose to market to the home user who wants a new fridge, even designed the packaging and advertising to target them. However, the designers didn’t see food storage as a key feature, they just made something to cool. Talk about missing the mark. And no, the product is not a fridge, but it is a consumer item.

The other one was terrible as well. They had a good goal in mind. Provide a solution to the customers problem. One solution, a simple narrow solution at a low price with high volume. Sounds good in theory, but you are banking on the fact that your one and only feature works good enough to make it through the early adoptor phase. The problem is, they did zero real world testing. 5 minutes with the new product, and it was obvious it was going to die. My predicition is their will be a ton of these in liquidation and dollar stores.

Its too bad, the outfit spent a fortune on packaging, marketing, and graphics. Unfortunately, the engineers did what they were told, they didn’t question it, they just picked up the spec and filled it out. Without exciting the early adoptors, there will be little market penetration. This product in 5 years might have been a good idea. A simple no frills solution to compete with an establised volume market. However, this outfit chose to go high volume from the get go at low cost and one bare bones feature. The perception is created that the product is flakey. Its not, its actually does work as promoed…. but, they have a quality perception issue to solve, (which would be taken care of through consumer experience) and the single feature and its cheap implementation are not going to help.