AI enabled Product Validation and Competitiveness

Much has been written in this article series about understanding customer needs and translating those needs into product requirements.

This article will begin with a related scenario:

A product is in early stages of development by Company A, when some competitive intelligence reveals Company B has a similar product nearing market launch. The Company B product outperforms the Company A product. 

Company A either:

• Makes no decision & continues to develop the product as-is
• Continues developing the product with modifications or added features to improve its competitiveness
• Discontinues development of the product, and starts over with a new technology or design concept

The decision to continue to develop the product and/or redirect the development effort is quite critical.  Several months of expensive product development effort can be wasted with a delayed decision, or no decision at all.

Automated intelligence could help make those decisions.  The following conceptual diagram shows what this might look like:

This is an automated validation and competitive analysis tool. 

Recall we are asking ‘what the product design shall provide” in order to meet the needs (from the various sources of information), and at “what” input conditions.  The requirement can be written or extracted from customer needs, or a product validation expert can write the requirement and have the AI tool evaluate it. 

• The AI capability can apply basic rules of requirements validation.  SMART = specific, measurable, achievable/attainable and testable.
• The AI capability can establish traceability between the requirement and the need.  Is there a need associated with the product requirement?  What is the source of the requirement or need?  (if not, this represents a potential risk, although a rationale can be added to the market analysis).
• Requirements represent a competitive advantage can be identified.
• Quality function deployment can be input into the AI engine or perhaps the AI engine can generate the QFD matrix.  The QFD matrix identifies the critical to quality requirements of the product.  More information on Quality Function Deployment can be found here. 

Finally, it is very important to consider validation as a continuous process.  As customer needs are clarified or competitive intelligence continues to be collected, the tool would continuously re-assess the viability of the product.

Continuous validation ensures a competitive product throughout the product development process.

This would be a valuable way to ensure the right product is developed and/or redirect new product development with new information.  Such a tool could save a company millions in cost avoidance by canceling project or developing uncompetitive products.