What did your customers already ask for?
What you measure, you can improve.
Nobody measures demand that was already voiced.
Look at what gets counted
What the stage gate process actually records when it decides what to build.
Market size
Estimated by the team proposing the thing. Nobody has ever failed to size their own idea generously.
An estimate
Strategic fit
A rating, one to five, given by the people in the room.
An opinion
Technical feasibility
The one column with real rigor behind it, and the only one anybody blocks on.
Assessed
Revenue projection
A number carried forward for years after everyone stopped believing it.
A forecast
What a customer actually asked for, and when
No measure
Your people took those calls. Nobody wrote it down anywhere the decision could see it.
We checked whether the methods ask
Twenty four published methods for selecting, scoring, or generating candidate products and services, coded on nine variables, with the coding frame declared before the corpus was read.
24
Methods coded
21
Address demand
2
Define what evidence a demand claim requires
The problem is not that these methods are careless. Most of them are careful, and two of the four criticisms we went looking for did not hold up. The gap is in one specific place. They ask how strong the demand is and almost never ask what evidence you have for the answer.
Your people already know
Sales heard it. Support logged it. Field service watched a customer build the workaround themselves. It never reached the room where the roadmap gets set, because no form could carry it.
So we ask everyone. A prompt and a box, and they type or dictate. Not what you think we should build. What did a customer ask you for. Who was it. What did you tell them. How often does that come up.
If a customer asked you for something last quarter that we do not sell, what was it?
Concrete, so it cannot be answered with a strategy statement. Specific, so it can be counted.
Everyone is included
Sales, support, field service, implementation, and the people who answer the phone. They are closer to unmet demand than anyone in the planning meeting, and they are asked in this process.
What comes back
Accounts of things customers actually asked for, structured, each carrying the class of evidence behind it. Recall of a documented occasion is not the same as somebody's hunch, and the two are never averaged together.
Nobody guesses to fill a blank
When a scoring sheet has an empty box, somebody puts a number in it, because the meeting has to end. That number is a guess and from then on it is treated as a fact.
An idea nobody has looked into gets ranked below one somebody was optimistic about, and it never comes back.
So we do not score what has not been checked. We mark it, and we say what would have to be found out.
One boundary, stated plainly
This tells you what was already asked for. It does not tell you what to build. That decision is yours and it should stay yours.
Your customers already told somebody.
Thirty minutes. What would you want to hear from the people who talk to your customers every day?