By Dave Fedewa, Asutosh Padhi and Jim Williams

We have had the privilege of working with some truly great product development functions. Many of today’s product companies have invested heavily in the expertise, tools and processes that allow them to create complex, high-performing designs that are easy to manufacture and which perform reliably, even in tough conditions.

Usually these achievements are completed remarkably quickly, as technologies evolve ever more rapidly and product lifecycles shorten, requiring a continuously accelerating process of incremental innovation. Too often, however, these brilliantly designed and engineered products have one important flaw: they are not what customers want.

The symptoms of this flaw are numerous, but the result is always the same. Products fail commercially because their customers find them too expensive or too complex, or because they lack critical features or underperform in specific but important ways. Sometimes these products sell well but don’t make money, as they are too expensive to manufacture or support at the price customers are prepared to pay.

A failure of insight

In all these cases, problems arise not because the engineers and designers working on these products lack skill, but because they are basing their design decisions on an incomplete or erroneous picture of customer needs. Simply put, they are using the wrong information.

As we have worked with product development leaders to diagnose and fix these issues, we have identified four common underlying causes that create critical disconnects in the product development process. We call them the insight traps:

1. Targeting the wrong customers .

2. Asking the wrong questions.

3. Failing to act on the information they have.

4. Failing to turn good customer insights into great products.

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