Product focus = customer focus
Creating customer-defined value is the first principle of lean thinking – the foundation of the lean enterprise. But how do you actually know that, behind the elimination of waste, your hard work will result in a product your customer truly values and will buy?
Well, you might ask them. And while that is a good start, it is rarely enough and often limiting. Although it is true that you should certainly listen to your customers, the best companies understand the potential value of their own products better than anyone else.
More than a limitation, relying solely on information provided by customers can become a crippling organizational dysfunction. Especially when understanding customer-defined value becomes code for “do another survey.” Excessive reliance on asking customers can lead to an insidious shift in the perception of responsibility, in which you make your customer responsible for your products. Any defensive comments, such as “it wasn’t in the survey data” or “they never said they wanted that,” are a giveaway.
Even translating your customers’ feedback into meaningful action can be challenging. Vague statements about delivering customer value can become the only vision for the sales and marketing team, which can lead to senseless cost cutting or, worse still, a voracious “more must be better” addiction, piling bells and whistles onto products in the hope that this will bring luck.
So how do you know that the entire organization is aligned to create value for your customer? Your product gives you that focus. In fact, it seems incredibly difficult to be a lean, customer-focused organization without comprehensive knowledge of, and an absolute passion for, your “product.” Your product is who you are as a company; it is your identity.
A company’s products are its most direct connection to its customer and the embodiment of all its value-creating activities (not to mention the company’s lifeblood). At Ford, we learned the hard way how important it is to have great products, and it was the product focus and passion that propelled us and allowed us to break down functional walls and combine traditional organizations into one global team to help drive our “One Ford” strategy.
An intense product focus provides other, less obvious advantages for the lean enterprise. It gives everyone something tangible to work on – a deep focus is far more specific than “customer value” (which can, in fact, be mysterious). And it also gives individuals the opportunity to develop true mastery, an often undervalued quality that provides the foundation for ongoing competitive advantage.
To become product-focused, companies must understand, better than anyone, the critical product/service attributes that truly matter to their customers. They must align their product attributes, operational and manufacturing processes, and quality priorities accordingly. In this way, product/process development should unite the whole company as an aligned, customer-focused lean enterprise.
A product/process development process is built on this deep organizational understanding and begins with a study period, or Kentou: a critical learning phase during which the organization understands and agrees on what it will do and how. It begins with immersion in the product. The Chief Engineer (CE) and a small team seek to understand everything about their product: its uses, cultural nuances, operating environment, competitors, manufacturing process, everything.
As you might expect, they begin their learning at the gemba: hands-on and face-to-face. Going to manufacturing, to the most important suppliers and to the test sites, taking part in competitive teardowns, meeting with outside evaluators, talking with customers, even looking outside their own field and, most importantly, using the product and watching it being used in the field.
There are many great stories about Chief Engineers and their teams on the Sienna, the Lexus and the Mustang who were very successful in this effort. The next step is to communicate with and align the rest of the organization. This begins with the CE’s role of outlining, qualitatively and quantitatively, their version of the new product. But it cannot end there.
The functional teams, masters of their respective disciplines and passionate about their product, begin to study what is needed to deliver their products with excellence. They work cross-functionally, with the CE examining, analyzing, testing and eventually agreeing on a path forward (lest the more skeptical among you think this is some cross-functional utopia, I can assure you that this process is shaped by robust dialogue, debate, tension and conflict, as passionate professionals strive for a truly great product). But in the end, the product is the mediating factor. What is right for the product? The responsibility for that, the tiebreaker, belongs to the CE. A lot of responsibility? You bet. That is why it is not easy to create good CEs, but that is a topic for a future article.
The result is not just a plan for a new product with unique and significantly expanded value potential, but also a powerful organizational focus and commitment to delivery. In addition, a deep understanding of exactly what is needed to create maximum value for the customer.
