After reading some of our posts, one could get the impression that we believe Ethnography is the magic bullet for increasing new product success to something more than the typical 3% to 5% probability. This is not quite the case. Believing that Ethnography is the single answer to product success would be just as ridiculous as the apparent belief held by firms that push their brand of usability testing, or focus groups, or surveys, or design, etc. to the exclusion of all other approaches.
What we do say is that, unless you deal with the so-called 'fuzzy front end' of New Product Development (the part that comes before Implementation--whatever you want to call it) in a disciplined manner, you should expect about a 3% to 5% probability of success.
There are four primary core competencies required in order for the front end of NPD to yield actionable information: Research, Marketing, Design and Engineering. Ethnography falls under the Research category. The four core must competencies work collaboratively in a process that can be summarized in the following diagram (click to enlarge it):
There are a number of influences, not the least of which is our own experience, on which we base our approach to NPD. Click the 'continuation' link below to read about these.
- Robert Cooper's notion of Stage Gates in NPD, origianally set forth in his seminal work, Winning at New Products
- Bill Abrams' The Observational Research Handbook: This book, more than any other, describes how to use Ethnography to solve practical business problems.
- Cagan's and Vogel's approach set forth in their book, Creating Breakthrough Products
In addition to providing a really clear process for pulling off the "Fuzzy Front End" of NPD, Cagan's and Vogel's case for the importance of interdisciplinary cooperation, their unambigous identification of the four core competencies and the importance of Ethnography are the ideas that have had the biggest effect on WARP3 Insights.
- Donald Norman's synthesis of the work of many others on the importance of emotional factors in product design in his book, Emotional Design
Norman's case against "usability reductionism" (i.e. everything is a usability problem) made a big impression on us.
- The notion, origianally set forth by Fitch (one of the great Product Development firms) that value consists of three parts: usefulness, usability and desire.
- IDEO, particularly the importance they place on engaging people in the Product Development process
There are others, but that's enough for one blog post...
DR
