Reflection – Learning Launch for product validation

Challenge

I am a member of product validation department of my organization and our challenge is to perform  product validation and provide design guidance to improve the product performance. The development  process broadly includes, market survey and benchmarking, target setting, proto development, product  validation and release of product into market. This scope includes close working and coordination with  various internal team such as marketing team for capturing customer requirements, design team for  generating in innovative ideas for design. The product must be launched in a stipulated time frame to take  advantage of the market demand. We will focus on the way we are capturing the benchmarking and  customer perception data to have right targets for design of new products and follow improved  assessment techniques for product validation.

Selection

We want to use the learning launch tool in order to effectively capture the product requirements and  inputs from benchmark products. We wanted to use new tools in capturing the data, setting of the targets  for design, and new methods to assess/validate our new product. This would help to have product with  better performance as expected by customer.

Application

For our first learning launch, we focused on the way we captured the customer requirements which are  important inputs to product development. Apart from having objective survey we introduced subjective  assessment to capture the customer inputs. We wanted to see the how the customer felt the benchmark  product subjectively as the objective data was helping us only half way through. We introduced the  subjective assessment charts which captured more information as the product was assessed by jury of  customers and experts. This data gave us a new insight. We had formed a team of experts and had 3day  workshop on the benchmark product assessment. Later the benchmark product was tested for objective  data. The combination of subjective and objective data helped greatly in setting the right targets to our  new product. Our team also gained training knowledge through these expert reviews. We were able to  set a new target/guideline for design of the product through this exercise.

For our second learning launch, we focused on priority product validation tasks. We had separate review/  workshops with design team and explained about how to use our new design guidelines to improve the  product design so that the product meets the validation requirements first time right. We also improved  the way the product validation is performed by new validation procedures which included prioritization  of tests. All the validation activities were performed with in the stipulated time frame and new product  was ready to be launched. Prior to launch we showcased the product to the experts and jury which had  members from different departments and customers. Through this subjective assessment it was found  that the product performance was meeting all the customer expectations. Later the new product was  launched, and we could capture the expected market demand at right time as targeted.

Insight

By applying the learning launch tool, we tested traditional assumptions of objective data and limited  validation tools. With the new learnings gained by subjective assessment and new validation techniques  we were able to improve our overall product development process which will be used in every new  product development. Additionally, we could gain knowledge in product assessment and perception of  different experts on product. In this process there was also improvement in the inter department  coordination and team building as well. With prioritization of validation activities, we could reduce the  overall product validation time there by reducing the time to market of the product. The incorporation of  insight is particularly important at this stage, as this will be used for innovative design thinking of future  products.

Approach

We had selected this learning launch tool as this is more appropriate for our design validation process at  this product development timeline. As mentioned earlier the knowledge gained with this insight will be  used for our future product development activities and improve further. This will also be used to train our  new joiners.

