FOR THE THINK TANK

1) Product planning

The first step of product development process is product planning which is the ongoing process of identifying and articulating market requirements that define a product's feature set. In this step we do the pre-project planning, formulate our target market and our assumption.in the mission statement we notice about on:

a. Brief description of our product

b. Key business goals

c. Markets

d. Assumptions and Constraints

e. Stakeholders

Project mission statement:

2) Identify customer need:

We focus on the customers need to ensure that our product is focused on customers need, identify latent needs of customer, justify the product specification, create a record of the needs for development process, ensure that none of the needs has not been missed and also development team members understand customers need. Identifying customer needs is a process divided into the following phases:

1) Gather raw data from customers (VOC)

2) Interpret raw data in terms of customer needs

3) Organize the need in to hierarchy needs

4) Establish relative importance of needs

5) Reflect on the result and process

1) Gather raw data from customer

To identify customer needs, our team started by gathering raw data through interviewing from people, contractors, house flippers. The team used one to one interview method for collecting data. And use note method for documenting data. The total number of customers interviewed was 44 (35 ordinary people, 7 contractor, 3 house agent). Most of The interviews with people were Conducted at university of California state university Northridge and the focus group were about 18 to 27 years old. The average age of the customers was 24 years.

2) Interpreted raw data from customer need :

in this step we Convert VOC into Customer Needs. In fact, we translate each statement into customer need. In translating we have to use positive statement rather than negative, specify the need as specific as in raw data and as a attribute of the product and also we are not allow to use word such as allow and should.

3) Establish relative importance of needs:

The relative importance of the customers need is necessary for the trade off that the team has to make and resource allocating. Our team selected a range from 1 to 5 to rank the customer needs where 5 indicating the most important need and 1 indicating the least important need.

4) Reflect upon the results and the process:

The final step in identifying customer needs is to reflect upon the results and the process. In this step we have to make sure that we had interact with all of the important types of a customer and about improvement our process in future. At the end of this step, the team finally agreed that the customer needs mentioned in table are comprehensive enough to proceed to next product development section.

3) Product specification

Customer’s needs are expressed in the language of customer so in this step the team developed a list of metrics for each of the customer needs to establish the relationship between the requirements of the design (stated from the customer’s point of view) and the product characteristic (in engineering terms). To be more precise these specification represent an agreement on what the team members have to achieve and attempt for to satisfy the customer’s need. These specifications consist of metric and their value. These metrics are generally referred to as the preliminary specifications, which are established after identifying customer needs and before concept generation.

Step 1) prepare a list of metrics

The need-metrics natrix: