Stage 2: Understanding The Opportunity Ethnography and The IDEO Design Process

1. Stage 2: Understanding The OpportunityEthnography and The IDEO Design Process Robert Monroe Innovative Product Development February 13, 2012

2. By The End Of Class Today, You Should: • Understand the inputs to, and the outputs of, Stage 2 – Understanding the Opportunity • Understand the role that ethnography can play in understanding your customers, how they use products, and refining your understanding of a new product or service opportunity that you have identified • Seen how a well-functioning team of product innovation experts work together to understand customers’ needs and desires and create new products that are useful, usable, and desirable

3. Phase 2 Overview: Understanding The Opportunity Gate1 Gate2 Phase 2 • Phase 1 outputs: • POG statement • JTBD’s • SET Factors • Scenario(s) • Value analysis (graphs, attributes) • Phase 2 activities: • Look, listen, learn • Stakeholder analysis • Ethnography: • - Interviews • - Field observations • Story and scenario generation • Task analysis • Detailed secondary research • Detailed data analysis • Phase 2 outputs: • Prioritized value opportunities • Detailed scenarios • Prioritized product attributes • Prioritized stakeholder list

4. Discovery Stage Outputs (Gate 1 Inputs) Required: • Statement describing the Product Opportunity Gap • Scenario description of one or two paragraphs that illustrates and brings to life the who, what, why, how, and when for the identified POG Optional (but useful as resources for later stages): • Job statement(s) for the Job(s) To Be Done we are targeting • Description of identified SET factors that lead to the conclusion this is a promising opportunity • Job scoping worksheets and conclusions • Nine boxes exercise output • Value analysis graphs and discussion of key value attributes

5. Understanding the Opportunity Stage: Tasks and Tools • Look, listen, learn • Stakeholder analysis • Task analysis • Ethnography • Prioritize value opportunities based on customer values • Product attribute identification and prioritization • Detailed scenario development (multiple) • Detailed secondary research • Detailed data analysis/mining from internal or external sources (when appropriate and available)

6. Understanding The Opportunity Phase Outputs • Detailed scenario(s) • Prioritized product attribute list • Prioritized stakeholder list and descriptions • Revised and refined value opportunity analysis

7. Example For Discussion: Product Opportunity Gap statement: • Help skilled, independent construction tradesmen speed up, simplify, and reduce the physical labor required to set up, organize, and break down their work areas on-site.

8. Scenario Example: Ahmed The Carpenter Ahmed is a skilled construction carpenter. He typically works alone or with a crew of one or two. When he arrives at the work site in the morning, he drops off his larger equipment as close to the work area as possible. Setting up a work area typically means carrying sawhorses and boards as well as large ladders and tools. Most of the equipment is heavy and many trips to a destination far from the truck can be time- and energy-intensive. If Ahmed can work near his truck, he often uses the tailgate as a cutting or work surface, even for eating lunch. Ahmed’s truck has side-mounted toolboxes that he installed and both a ladder rack and a towing hitch that were installed professionally. This means that he has no free space within his truck bed and that his tools often have to be put on the ground during unloading, which is damaging to both the tools and his back. Source: Adapted from [CV02] pp 181-182

9. Value Opportunities • Value Opportunities are places where the current solutions your customers use to do a job do not meet their needs and they would find an improvement in meeting those needs to be of value • Not all value opportunities are equally valuable! • The trick is to understand what improvements your customers would value enough to pay for, or that would convince them to buy your product instead of a competitors product • A big part of Stage 2 is identifying, understanding, and prioritizing the value opportunities that your POG captures • Identifying Value Opportunities leads to defining Product Attributes

10. Understanding Customers Through Ethnography • Ethnography can help you deeply understand your customers (and other stakeholders), their needs, wants and desires, what they actually do to complete a JTBD, and their views on the world • Key ideas: • Look, Listen, Learn • Focus on observing and gathering facts, explain and synthesize later • Plan your study thoughtfully to get the information you need • Results can be presented many ways – stories, visual artifacts, reports with detailed data analysis, videos, etc.

11. Collect Artifacts

12. Ethnography Examples • Watch IDEO teams at work – The Deep Dive, parts 1-3 • Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkHOxyafGpE • Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVZ8pmkg1do • Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyugyrCQTuw • Ethnography examples: • Laundromat video: • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Jydtrbk55U • What does it mean to be ‘green’? Video • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KtSQZ_lqSw

13. Planning Your Ethnography Study • What are we trying to learn? • What questions should we be answering with the study? • Who should we observe? How many observations? • When should we do the observations? • What, specifically, are we trying to see? • How will we conduct the observations? • Discretely or as a participant? • Staged events or “in the wild”? • How will we record what we observe? • Do we need participant permissions? • Where will we do our observations? Source: [SSD09] pp 21-26

14. Steps In An Ethnography Study • Plan the study • Identify your participants • Observe participants • Interview participants • Collect artifacts • Analyze data • Revisit hypotheses, revise if necessary • Document findings Source: [SSD09] pp 21-26

15. Exercise: Plan An Ethnographic Study • Using the scenario from Ahmed and the associated POG statement, outline a basic plan for an ethnographic study to better understand the needs, wants, and desires of Ahmed and customers like him

16. References [CE09] Robert G. Cooper and Scott Edgett, Successful Product Innovation, Product Development Institute, 2009, ISBN: 978-1-4392-4918-5. [CV02] Jonathan Cagan and Craig M. Vogel, Creating Breakthrough Products, Prentice Hall, 2002, ISBN: 0-13-969694-6. [SSD09] David Silverstein, Philip Samuel, NeilDeCarlo, The Innovator’s Toolkit, John Wiley and Sons, 2009, ISBN: 978-0-470-34535-1.