The task of product development is challenging in many ways. The task of developing products requires one part engineering, part segmentation expert and another part psychologist to understand what features and specifications the defined target customer would want (and be willing to pay for). One facet of this challenge is balancing the features that are required to ensure that he product fills the needs of the target customer, without over-burdening them with cost and complexity of unnecessary features and capabilities. It’s not an intuitive concept, but the truth is that products can be over-engineered if the target customer isn’t well defined, or well understood. Providing too much functionality or complexity can actually decrease the quality of the overall customer experience and even reduce sales outright.
As an example, of this danger consider the way that Intuit QuickBooks came about. Intuit’s flagship product was Quicken which was a strong accounting software package targeted at small companies. After conducting market research to understand who was using Quicken, and what function were really fundamental to the value of the product, Intuit realized that smaller and less sophisticated companies were using Quicken for very basic tasks. The found that very few of their users were actually trained and educated Accountants that needed the whole credit and debit process that Intuit had assumed. Many customers were only scratching the surface of the capabilities of the Quicken and were still encumbered by the complexity of the higher end Accounting tasks. Essentially many customers were simply using Quicken, simply as a way of managing their cash positions. After looking at the potential market and assessing the business opportunity they decided to create a less robust software with a more simplified user interface, and the result was QuickBooks, which has sold very well for Intuit and increased customer satisfaction with the segment of users who don’t need all of the other Accounting functionality that Quicken provided.
It’s critical to know who your customers are, and just how much functionality they want and how much complexity they can tolerate. Consider all of the engineering time that was wasted on millions of VCR’s with timing devices that flashed 12:00 for most or all of their lives – engineering time wasted and customer frustration that was created.
Know Thy Customer!
Chris Hawkes
