171: Choosing Features and Validating Your Invention

Tony Ulwick is the CEO of Strategyn, a company that has been in business since 1991 doing strategy consulting for high-growth innovative hardware companies. He is the author of two books, and has had his articles published twice in the Harvard Business Review. He started out in the early days of his career as a design for manufacturing engineer at IBM. Today Tony is going to share some valuable knowledge for inventors, startups, and small manufacturers on how to create hardware products that people want, why people buy your consumer product, and how to validate your invention idea through additive manufacturing in the market.

Today you will hear us talk about:

How do you create products that people want.

Figure out what your customer wants.

What is the reason that someone is buying your hardware product.

Define the market as a group of people that have a job that needs done via a hardware product.

Define the needs of the customer to figure out what they need to complete the job.

Desired outcome statements that your hardware product.

Dimensions to design something better are faster, more predictably, or great result. You should learn this about your customer.

You want to address the most unmet need.

An outcome of a job that is highly underserved. This is the most efficient path to growth.

What are the fewest number of features that we could have to hit the largest segment of customers.

Features come in all over the place as a hardware startup, so you need to be very clear on what features you need.

Start with the feature that you want, then figure it out with the customer.

How important is the feature to the customer, and how satisfied are you with the current solutions.

If you validate the opportunity, ensure that you design a great product offering to match that.

Short-run manufacturing is very helpful to validate the idea, at a low cost, and learn from your customers on what will fit the market in scale.

He talks about only one feature.

If you can have someone improve by 15% or more, you will have an amazing product.

What is that one need that is underserved in the market.

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