The PDMA Handbook of New Product Development

16.4. Stages of Customer Interaction

In which NPD stages should a manager interact with the customers? Overall, customer interaction may occur at all the stages of NPD, although the intensity of interaction may vary across various stages. Seemingly, customer input in the fuzzy front-end stages (see Chapter 6) of idea generation, screening, and concept development is more critical and useful than in the other later stages. For example, Philips, while developing an online children's toy in Europe, interacted with customers more intensely during the fuzzy front-end stages. Philips sent a team of designers and psychologists in mobile vans to various European countries to interact with both adults and children for their proposed new products. First, they hosted a series of dialogues with the selected group of people intensively to help brainstorm ideas for the new products. After generating a number of product ideas, they screened them with the help of those potential customers and finally selected one new online interactive product for children. Later, the team of researchers went back to the potential customers and tested the new product concept on the same children (McKenna, 1995). In the same vein, Boeing emphasized the need for customer interaction early in the process while developing its highly successful 777 aircraft as evidenced by the comments of Boeing's manager, Alan Mulally: "Not that we did not listen to our customers in the past, but the biggest lesson we learnt was ...