Anthony W. Ulwick

THE BREAKTHROUGH

Over the next five years, I studied and tried out many new tools that looked promising, including voice of the customer, quality function deployment (QFD), TRIZ, Six Sigma, and conjoint analysis. I studied everything that was written about these tools and used them in my product planning activities. I conducted hundreds of customer interviews and dozens of quantitative studies. I also worked with IBM statisticians to learn how to best apply conjoint, factor, and cluster analysis to segment markets in a meaningful way. I worked as an internal IBM consultant, using what I learned to help different internal teams formulate market and product strategies. IBM management was very supportive throughout this process, which is something I appreciate to this day.

It was in North Sydney, Australia, with an IBM team in 1990 when I had a mental breakthrough. Six Sigma thinking seeks to improve the quality of the output of a process by identifying and removing the causes of defects. It uses a set of quality management methods, mainly empirical, statistical methods, to address process deficiencies. It occurred to me that we could apply Six Sigma and process control principles to

innovation if we studied the process that people were trying to execute when they were using a product or service, rather than studying the product itself. Once we made the process the subject of our investigation, we’d be able to break it down into process steps, study each step in detail, and attach metrics to each step that we could measure and control in the design of a product.

I was so excited about this prospect that I struggled to sleep for days. As I thought about it more, I realized that to make this work I would have to figure out how to uncover the metrics that customers use to measure success and value as they go about executing these processes.