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Getting Accurate Customer/Client Input
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Jeff Miller
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Jan 26, 2006 10:26 PST
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Greetings...
Over the years, I've gotten lots of really good stuff (that's a highly
technical term) from the Innovation Network. The following recently
came across, and it struck me as unique way to get much more reliable
info from our customers and clients.
Be well.... /jeff
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------- Forwarded message follows -------
From: "InnovationNetwork" <sta-@thinksmart.com>
Subject: The Customer Speedboat Challenge, 2/25/2006
Heads-up! on Organizational Innovation
Brought to you by the InnovationNetwork
http://thinksmart.com/
(Please feel free to forward.)
**************************************************
** NEW! Innovation Book Club -- join us for a deep dive into some
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** NEW! Would you like to be able to ignite innovation in your
employees in only 30 minutes per week with no travel and no time
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we're working on. Contact Joyce Wycoff at
mailto:jwyc-@thinksmart.com and we'll arrange a time to talk.
** BEST BUSINESS CONCEPTS -- responses to this question are now
posted on the Heads-Up! blog --
http://thinksmart.typepad.com/headsup_on_organizational/
***************************************************
Archived at http://thinksmart.com
The Customer Speedboat Challenge
"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a
year of conversation."
-- Plato
It's a common knowledge that understanding customers' articulated
and unarticulated needs is a critical piece of the innovation
process. Gaining that wisdom, however, is much easier said than
done. It's easy to be overwhelmed as we hear and read volumes about
ethnography, lead users, customer archetypes and other processes for
gaining customer insight.
Enter Luke Hohmann, an inventor, author and software developer, who
has developed a set of "innovation games" to help people play their
way to deeper customer understanding. Here's an example:
** Speed BoatSM (from http://www.enthiosys.com)
Goal: Identify what customers don't like about your system
Activity: Draw a boat on a whiteboard or sheet of butcher paper.
You'd like the boat to really move fast. Unfortunately, the boat has
a few anchors holding it back. The boat is your system, and the
features that your customers don't like are its anchors.
Customers write what they don't like on an anchor. They can also
estimate how much faster the boat would go when that anchor was cut.
Estimates of speed are really estimates of pain. When customers are
finished posting their anchors, review each one, carefully
confirming your understanding of what they want to see changed in
the system.
Materials: Butcher paper, pens, 5x8 cards to capture what customers
don't like
(For an example of how this was used with an actual client, read the
story at http://www.enthiosys.com/forum/index.php?topic=23.0)
The Challenge:
There are many games available at
http://www.enthiosys.com/innovation.php. Pick one that appeals to
you and use it with one or more customers (internal or external) and
see what happens. Then let us know which game you picked and how it
worked. We'll then share your experiences. Because this might take
a while, we'll keep this challenge open till February 14th.
------- End of forwarded message -------
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