Use AI to unclog your new product pipeline

Is your new product pipeline filled with blockbusters destined to amaze customers and drive profitable growth for you? Or is it filled with twaddle… incremental innovation aimed at “guessed” market needs? With AI as your pipe wrench, these 3 steps will unclog your pipeline. Then your best new products will flow freely.

In our experience, most B2B companies have too many uninspired products in their new product pipeline, and too few that drive exciting revenue. When you properly unclog your pipeline, the remaining high-value projects move much faster, and you stop squandering R&D on failed projects.

But how do you unclog “properly?” Do you stop all R&D for a year while you thoroughly analyze every project in your new product pipeline? Hardly. Best to attack the number one cause of new product failures: For 5+ decades, we’ve known most new products fail due to inadequate market understanding. We call this commercial risk.

But conducting voice-of-customer interviews can take several months, right? This is where AI helps. If you’re willing to spend just 30 days and ~$3000 on each project, you can eliminate most commercial risk. Does that still sound like too much time and money? Consider how much you’ll spend on each ill-fated project clogging your new product pipeline for the next year or two.

If you spend just 30 days and ~$3,000 on each project, you can eliminate most commercial risk.

Step 1. Select which projects to analyze

You don’t have the time and resources to evaluate every single project that could be clogging your new product pipeline. Consider four factors:

• Timeline: If you’re planning on launching this product next quarter, don’t bother with this analysis. Forget what you’ve already spent. Instead, consider how much you have yet to spend.
• Spend Rate: Which projects in your new product pipeline have a hefty spend rate? Culling just one or two of these can free up significant resources for more productive R&D.
• Impact: Which projects have the potential to shake up the market? This analysis won’t just tell you which projects to drop. It can help you make them even better by aligning them with true market needs.
• Uncertainty: The more a project departs from your core markets and technologies, the more important this analysis will be.

Imagine your company makes corrugated boxes, and you have a concept for a new box for the e-commerce market. Let’s see how you’d apply this analysis.

Step 2. Diverge to all possible customer outcomes

Most new product pipelines start with new product concepts when they should start with the customer’s job to be done. To eliminate most commercial risk, you first diverge to all the relevant outcomes—desired customer end results—in the customer’s job to be done.

Does this mean you should start with divergent, qualitative, “Discovery” customer interviews? “Yes” for new projects aimed at thoroughly understanding a market segment. But “no” for rapidly unclogging your existing new product pipeline. Here’s what you’d do for your corrugated box project:

First, identify which customer outcomes you hoped your new box would satisfy. Suppose the project team was hoping to satisfy these outcomes:

• Less box damage from exposure to moisture
• Higher resolution printing on the box
• Faster sealing of the box after filling it

Second, generate “comparative” outcomes to market-test alongside your “hoped-for” outcomes. This lets you benchmark your hoped-for outcomes against other outcomes and ensures you don’t bias interviewees by only asking about your outcomes.

Where do you find these comparative outcomes? This is where AI helps. If you are a New Product Blueprinting user, take the following steps…

• In your Blueprinter^® software, set up a Discovery Noteboard for an AI interview, just as you would for human customers.
• In the upper right click “AI” and ask for 40 problems.
• Choose enough of these comparative outcomes so you have a total of 10 outcomes. In our box example, you’d pick 7 in addition to your 3 hoped-for outcomes (moisture damage, print resolution, and box sealing).

Step 3. Interview industry experts to prioritize outcomes

In our research we studied 12 voice-of-customer skills. Which one most strongly correlates with new product success? It was using quantitative customer interviews to prioritize customer outcomes. So we’ll use these critical interviews to unclog your new product pipeline.

In the New Product Blueprinting process, we call these Preference interviews. You’ll use these interviews to prioritize 10 outcomes—your hoped-for outcomes plus your AI-generated comparative outcomes.

But wait… can’t it take months to line up customers for these interviews? Yes, but here’s where your “AI pipe wrench” helps again. If you’re a Blueprinting user, you can tap into a network of over one million industry experts in the BluePros Expert Network, found in your Blueprinting Center.

Is it expensive to recruit industry experts? It used to be. But no longer with the AI-based, self-service BluePros™ Expert Network.  For $3000, you can conduct 6-10 thirty-minute Preference interviews… even with higher-cost experts (Tiers 2 & 3).

BluePros lets you quickly identify experts in your targeted industry—in this case e-commerce packaging. Within 2-3 weeks, you can easily conduct 6-10 virtual Preference interviews with these experts.

In these interviews you’ll ask experts to rate importance and current satisfaction on your 10 customer outcomes. This unbiased, unfiltered prioritization is the “secret sauce” to unclogging your new product pipeline.

Blueprinter software automatically generates a Market Satisfaction Gap chart after these interviews:

MSG = Avg. Importance x (10 – Avg. Satisfaction)

The more important and less satisfied the market is with an outcome, the more eager they’ll be to pay a price premium for improvement. Our clients have conducted over 1000 projects globally, and we’ve learned that teams should pursue outcomes with a Gap of ~30% or more. Imagine your corrugated box project yielded this chart:

Looks like the team’s plan to reduce moisture damage is a winner, with a Market Satisfaction Gap over 30%. Improving illegible printing is questionable, probably only worth pursuing if the cost is low. And the market doesn’t really care much about the effort to seal the box.

Is it time to “unclog” your new product pipeline?

When you run this AI-based analysis on your target projects, you’ll find that your next step for each project in your new product pipeline becomes obvious.

• Stop: If the market isn’t interested in what you’re hoping to deliver, put a screeching halt to the project.
• Continue: If you’re on the right track, keep going. If the Market Satisfaction Gap is especially high, consider loading on more resources to accelerate it.
• Course Correct: This is a common outcome. You learn your project is imprecisely aimed at market needs, but by altering your design targets you can create a product the market will love… and pay handsomely for.

Given its heavy reliance on AI, this approach may be new to you. It’s new to us as well. But by working with so many B2B companies, we’re learning quickly what works and what doesn’t. If you’d like to have a conversation with us about unclogging your new product pipeline, please contact us.