Focus on Success
Focus On Success WHAT IS GOOD ENOUGH? Whether a process or product assessment, the criteria used for acceptance plays a significant role in overall success. Too often “what is good enough” is decided in the middle of the critical path to the finish line. And the heady rush of almost completing a project, overrides the needed discipline of assessing what is “not good enough” or “good enough”. Couple the finish line in sight pressures with pressures of schedule delays and the potential costs, and it is not as easy as it seems to execute an independent assessment of exactly what is “good enough”. To help mitigate this risk and the pressure, setting goals for performance upfront that are realistic and success-based can help navigate the path to success. Setting performance expectations can be challenging. Unrealistic or unattainable is just as devastating to success as setting goals too low. To set appropriate performance goals, it is helpful to understand the current performance landscape and review end user expectations. This helps set the right criteria, at the right level and then using a program that assesses them along the development path will identify early needs to course correct. Reviewing the competitive landscape for new products, or products that use multiple segments of technology bundled in a new way, can seem tough. But breaking down the segments of performance expected can help isolate comparable elements of performance in the competitive arena. Knowing the current products on the market and their performance on similar elements, for example: speed; clarity; coverage; battery life; colorfastness; or whatever the core set of performance variables are, will help rank your product’s comparable performance. Ranking these is elements of performance is important. Not all performance expectations are equal. And meeting some while trading off another, can end up couple with what seems to be an unrelated performance expectation. For instance, having a connected product that is as fast or faster than competitors is an entry expectation. And supporting a myriad of applications simultaneously is common place. However battery life could be impacted by these performance variables. So an independent performance variable, re-charging speed, can become a higher ranking element due to the need to support high priority performance items, than it might be as an independent variable if considered in isolation. In the ranking process then, associating related or interdependent elements will be helpful to understand true experienced performance from a holistic perspective. And this holistic perspective requires understanding the customer’s expectation and also their usage patterns. Understanding how customers plan to interaction with your product and how much they will pay for performance, when they intend to use it, why they are using it, and who that customer is, contributes to correctly setting and ranking your performance elements, or sets of related elements. What a customer is willing to pay for performance in a product they intend to use for their own work or staying connected, may be different than performance they expect from a product they intend to give to a youth they want to use for educational games. These devises use many of the same design elements,
performance elements, and overall usage parameters, but the expectations for performance and cost points may be very different. This makes knowing your customer and their expected use pattern as important as understanding what else is on the market with a similar feature and how it performance, at a given price point. Taking the time to study this when setting performance criteria and targets is a key factor in delivering a product that can meet or exceed expectations. It will also speed up the overall development time and support getting to market in an effective and efficient manner. I Knowing what you need to target, knowing what ranking and tradeoffs may be made, or what cannot be traded off in performance, can speeds the overall development process. It helps set resources on the right path to “good enough”. It also sets tangible comparative performance to compare to along the way. This in turn helps ensure any course correction needed is understood early and can be made with relative ease. Waiting until a product is fully developed and hoping it is better than competitors, can mean expectations are exceed. But if these are not what a customer truly cares about, this may not be true success. And if it means another element was missed, that is a genuine customer satisfier and is present in other competitors on the market, it can mean failure. Setting clear performance criteria for what will be considered “good enough” using a robust competitive review and a study of customer use patterns and expectations, will create a successful recipe for acceptable product performance. The competitive landscape will provide input on how products will be compared generically across performance elements for the same or similar functions. And understanding how these functions are prioritized and perceived by the user, can make all the difference in customer satisfaction. And at the end of the day, what the customers says is “good enough” will win the day.
Look for other articles to help “Focus on Success” from the Managing Partner of FACS: Fry Advisory Consulting Service, Lyndall C Fry.
performance elements, and overall usage parameters, but the expectations for performance and cost points may be very different. This makes knowing your customer and their expected use pattern as important as understanding what else is on the market with a similar feature and how it performance, at a given price point. Taking the time to study this when setting performance criteria and targets is a key factor in delivering a product that can meet or exceed expectations. It will also speed up the overall development time and support getting to market in an effective and efficient manner. I Knowing what you need to target, knowing what ranking and tradeoffs may be made, or what cannot be traded off in performance, can speeds the overall development process. It helps set resources on the right path to “good enough”. It also sets tangible comparative performance to compare to along the way. This in turn helps ensure any course correction needed is understood early and can be made with relative ease. Waiting until a product is fully developed and hoping it is better than competitors, can mean expectations are exceed. But if these are not what a customer truly cares about, this may not be true success. And if it means another element was missed, that is a genuine customer satisfier and is present in other competitors on the market, it can mean failure. Setting clear performance criteria for what will be considered “good enough” using a robust competitive review and a study of customer use patterns and expectations, will create a successful recipe for acceptable product performance. The competitive landscape will provide input on how products will be compared generically across performance elements for the same or similar functions. And understanding how these functions are prioritized and perceived by the user, can make all the difference in customer satisfaction. And at the end of the day, what the customers says is “good enough” will win the day.
Look for other articles to help “Focus on Success” from the Managing Partner of FACS: Fry Advisory Consulting Service, Lyndall C Fry.
