No doubt you’ve been in meetings where a customer has said something like, “This would be an unbeatable product if only it _______.” I’ll let you fill in the blank.

Unless it’s a top-tier customer with lots of money at stake, the chance of one of these suggestions turning into a product feature is very, very small. Yet, companies receive ideas from customers all the time. And many of them are quite good.

Why? Because customers know what they need from the products they buy.

But even if individual ideas are not feature worthy, combining and analyzing them may reveal trends or needs you hadn’t considered before. And those revelations could lead to some competitive products and capabilities.
Ingredient number 3 in this series on turning innovation into a core business process is simple: Embrace the voice of your customer.

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Suggestion boxes are a great tool in a restaurant, spa or car dealership. It allows customers to submit anonymous tips on whimsical non-timely items that could improve service.

Now BP is using this proven technique on a much larger scale. So far they’ve accepted 35,000 ideas on how to stop the flow of oil in the Gulf in a giant suggestion box manned by 70 staffers.

At Accept Corporation, we don’t know much about oil, but we do have a suggestion based on our expertise in ideation; BP, improve your suggestion box.
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On Monday, Forbes.com posted an article by Laurie Burkitt on the World’s Most Reputable Companies, an interesting and enlightening article about brand value and reputation – and how reputation is tied to innovation. We’ve posted a comment on the article, and we agree that relationship to innovation strengthens customer satisfaction, and thought we would share it on our blog. Below is our comment in full:
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Devolution of Whole Product Launch

One of the best practices I communicate in my client work is Whole Product Launch (WPL). I help companies define success by brainstorming on what it looks like, appears to be, customer satisfaction, etc. i.e. What needs to happen before customers get value not what needs to happen before we release the software.

However, I’ve noticed as companies embrace Agile this concept is difficult. The cross-functional team best practice in Waterfall is evolving to a product team that does delay stand-ups showing progress. However, many of the deliverables for WPL do not lend themselves to a daily stand-up. And many of the people in the cross-functional team are not really part of the new “product team”. Also, since some of these deliverables have long lead times they either devolve into lesser outcomes or are done “after” the release.

The result is poor or late sales enablement, customer training materials, press release, etc.

So how should one bring Whole Product through an Agile process? More on that next week…

I was working with a customer this week doing a process diagnostic. One of the things they happened to mention is that they miss waterfall. I was surprised as these days all I hear is how everyone wants to be more agile.

I asked for more, and the anecdote provided was that they cannot get commitment to specific Features being delivered as part of a release as they could in the past. Their requirements process had migrated from Features to User Stories where if they asked for a Feature the first response was give us the stories and then when asked when they can get the features they were told “when it’s done”!

Now of course, for any company where success is meeting market needs, this is not desired. So after that phase of the diagnostic was complete, I mentioned we could help them create an environment where Features and Stories can coexist and a release commitment could be created. I do not see this as breaking agile simply making it work in an environment where the Product Owner needs to meet the team’s needs but also the needs of a commercial company where commitment to stories is not enough. Do you agree?