Identifying customer needs is a crucial step in the development process. The development team must create a complete set of customer need statements. To accomplish this interviews or focus groups with customers must be done and the raw data from these interactions analyzed and prioritized for design. customer need statement: Taking what the customer states in an interview or focus group and transferring that into a positive, specific product attribute that addresses this concern.
Once customer needs statements have been created, these are turned into preliminary product specifications. To do this effectively, needs can be categorized into a hierarchy including primary "must-haves", secondary "nice-to-haves" and tertiary "neutral" needs.
product specifications are a list of statements that describe what the product has to do in measurable terms.
For example, for a vacuum cleaner here is a customer needs statement turned into a product specification:
Customer need statement: "I need to be able to clean up confetti after parties in the conference room"
Product specification: The vacuum cleaner has the power to suck up fragments up to 1 inch in diameter and 0.1 lbs in weight.