Articles

Product strategy that’s customer-centric

One of the principles of design thinking is that you need to get employees from different departments, who serve various functions, sitting in a room together and working on solving problems. The natural instinct of employees is to look at a problem from the [...]

The Empowered Customer Movement in Healthcare

Increased globalization and technological change are leading the global healthcare industry away from the old physician-based system to one in which the customer is at the center. Customer service has become central to all businesses, and healthcare is no [...]

What you can learn from extreme customers

Traditional marketing teaches businesses to identify and map out the wants and needs of their typical customer. In addition to this technique, design thinking asks companies to look at their extreme customers. These are customers on either end of the spectrum [...]

Launching your product the right way

Companies invest millions of dollars each year developing new products and trying to increase their revenues and profitability. Some of these products succeed but unfortunately most are failures. Product launch activities have a lot to do with the success rate [...]

Innovation requires customer understanding

I have led many innovation projects over the last 17 years and I have come to understand that a large number of new product development projects go south because of poor definition and/or lack of customer understanding. A good way to avoid this problem and [...]