Business
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT TEAM STRUCTURE: IDENTIFYING THE UNMET NEEDS OF B2B CUSTOMERS
Published by Gbaf News
Posted on February 15, 2017
10 min readLast updated: January 21, 2026
Global Banking and Finance Review
Company
Published by Gbaf News
Posted on February 15, 2017
10 min readLast updated: January 21, 2026
Chandler Hatton, Michael Kolk, Martijn Eikelenboom, Mitch Beaumont
In our Global Innovation Excellence survey, “Identifying customers’ unmet needs” was identified as one of the most important factors for innovation success, with the best practitioners outperforming others by over 20%. However, finding the best way to organize and manage customer interaction is anything but simple, especially when the product is technically complex. For example, often the marketing or sales functions “own” the customer relationship, but are they the best people to uncover highly technical customer needs?
In this article, we review the highlights from the analysis and offer some guidance to help companies organize their customer-needs intelligence teams. Our research shows that most companies tend to either use a one-size-fits-all approach, or else approach the situation with ad hoc arrangements. However, it also shows that “getting it right” can lead to doubling of innovation success rates and have significant impact on R&D effectiveness. This is something B2B companies cannot afford to ignore.
Identifying customer needs and characterizing a team skill set
First of all, it is helpful to consider what sort of typical organizational approaches companies choose when their R&D and commercial functions interact with customers. Four stereotypical approaches are commonly used, as shown in Table 1.
In order to decide which organizational approaches might work best in each situation, it is helpful to consider the different types of customer needs that have to be identified in B2B industries, and therefore the skill combinations that may be required within the team. Two dimensions are important in this respect:
By identifying the degree to which B2B customer needs are clear (expressed) or unclear (latent), and the degree to which technology needs are known (expressed) or unclear (latent), we can start to characterize the most appropriate skill set that a multifunctional product development team will need in order to develop a winning product.The ability to identify latent needs and translate them into concrete product requirements can be referred to as “solution design skills”. Different situations call for different solution design skills, and the availability of the right solution design skills is of critical importance for effective needs recognition. Because latent needs are highly dependent on context and difficult to tease out of data sets, product development practitioners must be familiar with effective approaches to identifying latent needs and know when to apply a given approach.
Organizing teams according to a needs “matrix”
Companies can use the analysis above to help make informed decisions about how best to organize their teams. The four approaches described above can be mapped to the four quadrants of a “Customer Needs/Technology Needs” matrix, as shown in Table 2. Having the right solution design skills on the team to suit customer or technology needs is critically important. With this in mind we can consider each quadrant of the matrix in turn:
Five key success factors
The approaches detailed above and their applications may seem relatively straightforward. However, the study showed that in practice few of the sample companies actually followed these optimal approaches, and most were unsatisfied with their current efforts. Analysis of the most common shortcomings revealed five key success factors:
As part of our research we asked companies to categorize recent new-product development projects in terms of whether they used the “optimal” or “non-optimal” organizational approach (as described above), and whether these projects were “successful” in terms of reaching their objectives. The results showed that the project success rate was actually doubled by using the optimal approach (Table 3).
Conclusion
Obtaining a deep understanding of B2B customer needs is central to any new-product development process. In a complex customer relationship, finding the best way to organize and manage customer interaction is anything but simple, especially when the product is technically complex. Rather than adopting a “one-size-fits-all”approach, companies need to choose the best organizational method for their particular needs.
Chandler Hatton, Michael Kolk, Martijn Eikelenboom, Mitch Beaumont
In our Global Innovation Excellence survey, “Identifying customers’ unmet needs” was identified as one of the most important factors for innovation success, with the best practitioners outperforming others by over 20%. However, finding the best way to organize and manage customer interaction is anything but simple, especially when the product is technically complex. For example, often the marketing or sales functions “own” the customer relationship, but are they the best people to uncover highly technical customer needs?
In this article, we review the highlights from the analysis and offer some guidance to help companies organize their customer-needs intelligence teams. Our research shows that most companies tend to either use a one-size-fits-all approach, or else approach the situation with ad hoc arrangements. However, it also shows that “getting it right” can lead to doubling of innovation success rates and have significant impact on R&D effectiveness. This is something B2B companies cannot afford to ignore.
Identifying customer needs and characterizing a team skill set
First of all, it is helpful to consider what sort of typical organizational approaches companies choose when their R&D and commercial functions interact with customers. Four stereotypical approaches are commonly used, as shown in Table 1.
In order to decide which organizational approaches might work best in each situation, it is helpful to consider the different types of customer needs that have to be identified in B2B industries, and therefore the skill combinations that may be required within the team. Two dimensions are important in this respect:
By identifying the degree to which B2B customer needs are clear (expressed) or unclear (latent), and the degree to which technology needs are known (expressed) or unclear (latent), we can start to characterize the most appropriate skill set that a multifunctional product development team will need in order to develop a winning product.The ability to identify latent needs and translate them into concrete product requirements can be referred to as “solution design skills”. Different situations call for different solution design skills, and the availability of the right solution design skills is of critical importance for effective needs recognition. Because latent needs are highly dependent on context and difficult to tease out of data sets, product development practitioners must be familiar with effective approaches to identifying latent needs and know when to apply a given approach.
Organizing teams according to a needs “matrix”
Companies can use the analysis above to help make informed decisions about how best to organize their teams. The four approaches described above can be mapped to the four quadrants of a “Customer Needs/Technology Needs” matrix, as shown in Table 2. Having the right solution design skills on the team to suit customer or technology needs is critically important. With this in mind we can consider each quadrant of the matrix in turn:
Five key success factors
The approaches detailed above and their applications may seem relatively straightforward. However, the study showed that in practice few of the sample companies actually followed these optimal approaches, and most were unsatisfied with their current efforts. Analysis of the most common shortcomings revealed five key success factors:
As part of our research we asked companies to categorize recent new-product development projects in terms of whether they used the “optimal” or “non-optimal” organizational approach (as described above), and whether these projects were “successful” in terms of reaching their objectives. The results showed that the project success rate was actually doubled by using the optimal approach (Table 3).
Conclusion
Obtaining a deep understanding of B2B customer needs is central to any new-product development process. In a complex customer relationship, finding the best way to organize and manage customer interaction is anything but simple, especially when the product is technically complex. Rather than adopting a “one-size-fits-all”approach, companies need to choose the best organizational method for their particular needs.
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