Lecture 5

Product design and development
Lec - 05
Development process and organization
Lecturer: Daniel Mengistu

HARAMAYA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Outline of the presentation
Generic development process

Concept development process
Opportunity Identification
Identifying Customer Needs
Specifications
30-Nov-22 Product design and developement by Daniel. M 2

Generic development process
The six phases of the generic development process are:
Planning: This phase begins with opportunity identification guided by

corporate strategy and includes assessment of technology developments
and market objectives.
The output of the planning phase is the project mission statement, which
specifies the target market for the product, business goals, key
assumptions, and constraints.

Generic development process cont’
Concept development: The needs of the target market are identified,
alternative product concepts are generated and evaluated, and one or
more concepts are selected
A concept is a description of the form, function, and features of a
product and is usually accompanied by a set of specifications, an
analysis of competitive products, and an economic justification of the
project.
System-level design: The system-level design phase includes the
definition of the product architecture, decomposition of the product into
subsystems

Initial plans for the production system and final assembly are usually
defined during this phase as well.
Detail design: The detail design phase includes the complete
specification of the geometry, materials, and tolerances of all of the
unique parts.
The output of this phase is the control documentation for the product, the
drawings or computer files describing the geometry of each part and its
production tooling,

Testing and refinement: The testing and refinement phase involves the
construction and evaluation of multiple preproduction versions of the
product.
Production ramp-up: In the production ramp-up phase, the product is
made using the intended production system. The purpose of the ramp-up
is to train the workforce and to work out any remaining problems in the
production processes.



Concept development process
The concept development process includes the following activities:
Identifying customer needs: The goal of this activity is to understand

customers’ needs and to effectively communicate them to the
development team.
The output of this step is a set of carefully constructed customer need
statements, organized in a hierarchical list.
Establishing target specifications: Specifications provide a precise
description of what a product has to do. They are the translation of the
customer needs into technical terms.

Concept development process cont’
Targets for the specifications are set early in the process and
represent the hopes of the development team. Later these
specifications are refined
Concept generation: Concept generation includes a mix of external
search, creative problem solving within the team, and systematic
exploration of the various solution fragments the team generates.
The result of this activity is usually a set of 10 to 20 concepts, each
typically represented by a sketch and brief descriptive text.

Concept selection: Concept selection is the activity in which various
product concepts are analyzed and sequentially eliminated to identify
the most promising concept(s).
Concept testing: One or more concepts are then tested to verify that the
customer needs have been met, assess the market potential of the
product, and identify any shortcomings that must be remedied during
further development.
Setting final specifications: The target specifications set earlier in the
process are revisited after a concept has been selected and tested.

The team must commit to specific values of the metrics reflecting the
constraints inherent in the product concept, limitations identified
through technical modeling, and trade-offs between cost and
performance.
Project planning: the team creates a detailed development schedule,

devises a strategy to minimize development time, and identifies the
resources required to complete the project.
Economic analysis: The team, often with the support of a financial

analyst, builds an economic model for the new product.

Benchmarking of competitive products: An understanding of
competitive products is critical to successful positioning of a new
product and can provide a rich source of ideas for the product and
production process design.
Modeling and prototyping: These may include, among others: early
“proof-of concept” models, which help the development team to
demonstrate feasibility;
“form-only” models, which can be shown to customers to evaluate
ergonomics and style;
spreadsheet models of technical trade-offs; and

experimental test models, which can be used to set design parameters
for robust performance.

Opportunity Identification
What Is an Opportunity?
An opportunity is an idea for a new

product.
An opportunity is a product
description in embryonic form, a
newly sensed need, a newly
discovered technology, or a rough
match between a need and a possible
solution.
It can be thought of as a hypothesis
about how value might be created.
Opportunity Identification cont.
Types of Opportunities
Two dimensions are particularly useful.

The extent to which the team is familiar with the solution likely to be
employed, and
The extent to which the team is familiar with the need that the solution
addresses.
Horizon 1 opportunities are largely improvements, extensions, variants, and
cost reductions of existing products for existing markets.

Horizon 2 opportunities push out into less known territory in one or both
of the dimensions of the market or the technology.
Horizon 3 opportunities represent attempts to exploit opportunities that in
some way are new to the world, embodying the highest level of uncertainty.


Opportunity Identification Process
Step 1: Establish a Charter: The innovation charter articulates the goals
and establishes the boundary conditions for an innovation effort.
Step 2: Generate and Sense Many Opportunities: About half of
innovation opportunities are generated internally to an organization and
about half are recognized from customers and other external sources.

Opportunity Identification Process cont.
The seven basic techniques

for stimulating the
identification of
opportunities.

Step 3: Screen Opportunities
To eliminate opportunities that are highly unlikely to result in the creation
of value and to focus attention on the opportunities worthy of further
investigation.
Two methods are effective approaches to screening:
A Web-based interface can ensure that the participants don’t know the
author of each idea, so they will base their votes on the quality of the
opportunity, not their opinion of its originator. Respondents may indicate
yes–no vote on whether or not the opportunity deserves further
investment.

Alternatively, you can use a 1–10 scale, which may be useful if you
have a relatively small group of people voting.
With multivoting, you display opportunities on pages posted on the
walls of the room where you’re conducting your workshop. Raters are
given “dots” (or other types of stickers) to register their votes.
Workshops work well for reviewing up to about 50 opportunities.

Step 4: Develop Promising Opportunities
After screening opportunities, the team should invest modest levels of
resources in developing a few of them.
You might invest a few days to a few weeks in each of several promising
opportunities.
The goal is to resolve the greatest uncertainty surrounding each one at
the lowest cost in time and money.

Step 5: Select Exceptional Opportunities
Enough uncertainty should be resolved in order to pick the exceptional few
opportunities that warrant a significant investment in product development.
One specific approach used within established companies is the Real-Win-
Worth-it (RWW) method.
The name, Real-Win-Worth-it, summarizes the three questions an
organization should attempt to answer when screening opportunities:

Is the opportunity real? Is there a real market that you can serve with the
product? Criteria here include market size, potential pricing, availability
of technology, and the likelihood the product can be delivered in the
required volume at the required cost.
Can you win with this opportunity? Can you establish a sustainable
competitive advantage? Can you patent or brand the idea? Are you more
capable of executing it than competitors? For example, do you have
superior engineering talent in this field?
Is the opportunity worth it financially? Do you have the resources
needed (financial and developmental) and are you confident that the
investment will be rewarded with appropriate returns?

Step 6: Reflect on the Results and the Process
Some questions to consider in reflecting on the opportunity identification
results and processes are:
How many of the opportunities identified came from internal sources
versus external sources?
Did we consider dozens or hundreds of opportunities?
Was the innovation charter too narrowly focused?
Were our filtering criteria biased, or largely based on the best possible
estimates of eventual product success?
Are the resulting opportunities exciting to the team?

Identifying Customer Needs

The Importance of Latent Needs
Latent needs are those not yet widely recognized by most customers, and
not yet fulfilled by existing products.
The needs exist, and if fulfilled, would result in greater customer

satisfaction

The Process of Identifying Customer Needs
The five steps are:
Step 1: Gather Raw Data from Customers
Three methods are commonly used:
1. Interviews: One or more development team members discusses needs

with a single customer.
2. Focus groups: A moderator facilitates a two-hour discussion with a
group of 8 to 12 customers.
3. Observing the product in use: Watching customers use an existing
product or perform a task for which a new product is intended.

The Process of Identifying Customer Needs cont.
Step 2: Interpret Raw Data in Terms of Customer Needs
Customer needs are expressed as written statements and are the result of
interpreting the need underlying the raw data gathered from the
customers.

The Process of Identifying Customer Needs cont.

Need statements
Guidelines for writing needs statements.
Express the need in terms of what the product has to do, not
in terms of how it might do it.
Express the need as specifically as the raw data.
Use positive, not negative, phrasing.
Express the need as an attribute of the product.
Avoid the words must and should.

Need statements cont.
Step 3: Organize the Needs into a Hierarchy
The goal of step 3 is to organize these needs into a useful hierarchical list. The
list will typically consist of a set of primary needs, each one of which will be
further characterized by a set of secondary needs.
1. Print or write each needs statement on a separate card or self-stick note.
2. Eliminate redundant statements.
3. Group the cards according to the similarity of the needs they express.

4. For each group, choose a label.
5. Consider creating supergroups consisting of two to five groups.
6. Review and edit the organized needs statements.



Step 4: Establish the Relative Importance of the Needs
A sense of the relative importance of the various needs is essential to making
these trade-offs correctly. The outcome of this step is a numerical importance
weighting for a subset of the needs. There are two basic approaches to the
task:
Relying on the consensus of the team members based on their experience
with customers, or
Basing the importance assessment on further customer surveys.
Some questions to ask include:
• Have we interacted with all of the important types of customers in our
target market?
•
Are we able to see beyond needs related only to existing products to
capture the latent needs of our target customers?
Are there areas of inquiry we should pursue in follow-up interviews or

surveys?
Which of the customers we spoke to would be good participants in our

ongoing development efforts?
What do we know now that we didn’t know when we started? Are we

surprised by any of the needs?

Specifications
What Are Specifications?
Customer needs are generally expressed in the “language of the customer.”
Teams usually establish a set of specifications, which spell out in precise,
measurable detail what the product has to do.
For example, in contrast to the customer need that “the suspension is easy
to install,” the corresponding specification might be that “the average time
to assemble the fork to the frame is less than 75 seconds.”
When Are Specifications Established?
Specifications are established at least twice. Immediately after identifying
the customer needs, the team sets target specifications.

Specifications cont.
These specifications represent the hopes and aspirations of the team, but
they are established before the team knows what constraints the product
technology will place on what


The two stages in which specifications are established
Establishing Target Specifications
Target specifications are established after the customer needs have been
identified but before product concepts have been generated and the most
promising one(s) selected.
The process of establishing the target specifications contains four steps:
1. Prepare the list of metrics.
2. Collect competitive benchmarking information.
3. Set ideal and marginally acceptable target values.
4. Reflect on the results and the process.



A few guidelines should be considered when constructing the list of metrics:
Metrics should be complete.
Metrics should be dependent, not independent, variables.
Metrics should be practical.
Some needs cannot easily be translated into quantifiable metrics.
The metrics should include the popular criteria for comparison in the
marketplace.

Step 2: Collect Competitive Benchmarking Information
Unless the team expects to enjoy a total monopoly, the relationship of the
new product to competitive products is paramount in determining
commercial success.
Step 3: Set Ideal and Marginally Acceptable Target Values

Two types of target value are useful: an ideal value and a marginally
acceptable value.
:
The ideal value is the best result the team could hope for. The marginally
acceptable value is the value of the metric that would just barely make the
product commercially viable

There are five ways to express the values of the metrics:
1. At least X:
2. At most X:
3. Between X and Y:
4. Exactly X:
5. A set of discrete values

The team may require some iteration to agree on the targets.



Setting the Final Specifications

Specifications that originally were only targets expressed as broad ranges
of values are now refined and made more precise.
Finalizing the specifications is difficult because of trade-offs—inverse
relationships between two specifications that are inherent in the selected
product concept.
Trade-offs frequently occur between different technical performance
metrics and almost always occur between technical performance metrics
and production cost.

There may also be trade-offs between product performance and
development time or cost.
Another trade-off is between cost and mass. For a given concept, the
team may be able to reduce the mass of the fork by making some parts
out of titanium instead of steel.


Steps in setting final Specifications
Step 1: Develop Technical Models of the Product
A technical model of the product is a tool for predicting the values of the
metrics for a particular set of design decisions.
For example, had the team chosen an oil-damped coil spring concept for
the suspension fork, the design decisions faced by the team include
details such as the materials for the structural components, the orifice
diameter and oil viscosity for the damper, and the spring constant.
Technical model is shown below.

Steps in setting final Specifications cont.

When analytical models are not available, the team build a variety of
different physical mock-ups or prototypes to explore the implications of
several combinations of design variables.
To reduce the number of models that must be constructed, it is useful to
employ design-of-experiments (DOE) techniques, which can minimize
the number of experiments required to explore the design space.
Such models can be used to predict the product’s performance along a
number of dimensions.

Step 2: Develop a Cost Model of the Product
The goal of this step of the process is to make sure that the product can
be produced at the target cost.
For most products, the first estimates of manufacturing costs are
completed by drafting a bill of materials (a list of all the parts) and
estimating a purchase price or fabrication cost for each part.


Step 3: Refine the Specifications, Making Trade-Offs Where Necessary
Once the team has constructed technical performance models where
possible and constructed a preliminary cost model, these tools can be
used to develop final specifications.
One important tool for supporting this decision-making process is the
competitive map.
Step 4: Flow Down the Specifications as Appropriate

The challenge in this case is to flow down the overall specifications to
specifications for each subsystem.

For example, the overall specifications for an automobile contain metrics
like fuel economy, 0–100 km/hr acceleration time, and turning radius
The specifications for the engine include metrics like peak power, peak
torque, and fuel consumption at peak efficiency.
One challenge in the flow-down process is to ensure that the subsystem
specifications in fact reflect the overall product specifications—that if
specifications for the subsystems are achieved, the overall product
specifications will be achieved.


THANK YOU

Lecture 5

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Product design and development

Lecturer: Daniel Mengistu

Generic development process

30-Nov-22 Product design and developement by Daniel. M 2

Planning: This phase begins with opportunity identification guided by

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Identifying customer needs: The goal of this activity is to understand

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Project planning: the team creates a detailed development schedule,

Economic analysis: The team, often with the support of a financial

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An opportunity is an idea for a new

Two dimensions are particularly useful.

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The seven basic techniques

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The needs exist, and if fulfilled, would result in greater customer

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1. Interviews: One or more development team members discusses needs

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Are there areas of inquiry we should pursue in follow-up interviews or

Which of the customers we spoke to would be good participants in our

What do we know now that we didn’t know when we started? Are we

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Step 3: Set Ideal and Marginally Acceptable Target Values

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Step 4: Reflect on the Results and the Process

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