Gathering Information about Customer Preferences

To design a product that meets a customer need, you need to gather detailed information about customer preferences. While this sounds like a straightforward activity, in reality, it is not. Unlike evaluating customer preferences for refinements to existing products and services, evaluating customer preferences for new products and services is hard to do with standard market research tools, such as focus groups and customer surveys. For truly new products and services, which are the ones that entrepreneurs are the most effective at introducing, you need to do things like forecast trends and potential adoption patterns to learn about customer preferences.

Stop! Don’t Do It! Don’t try to meet customer needs that you can’t solve with the products and services you can create. Don’t forget to ask yourself how you will meet customer needs.