Archive for the ‘how to’ Category

If customers can’t tell you what they want, how can they help you develop a differentiating strategy?  By walking you through gemba.

Gemba is a Japanese word for “the place where things happen.”  The term comes to American companies by way of the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) movement where gemba refers to the place where the product is used by the customer. Here, a gemba walk is the act of observing the product’s use so that product developers can close the gap between what is being delivered and what the customer actually needs.

The concept of a gemba walk can be just as valuable to business strategists looking to redesign a business model — with two adaptations:

First, it’s critical to expand the concept of “product use” to include all stages of the Customer Lifecycle — from how it is specified, selected and purchased, through how it is received, deployed, used, supported and ultimately replaced.

Second, it can be quite impractical if not impossible to directly observe the customer’s actions — and more importantly, the thinking behind them — at each Customer Lifecycle stage. So we augment direct observation with a simple but structured interview technique, described below.

You’re trying to create a narrative of the truth, told in the context of the big picture, and the big picture is this: your product provides value to your customers in ways that impact (positively or negatively) the ability of each person in the Customer Lifecycle to add value. So it’s important to interview everyone in your Customer Lifecycle — not just the people in purchasing — and understand how their value stories interrelate.

For each person you interview, you want to understand four things: 1) how does their role add value to their company, 2) what is their process for delivering value, 3) what challenges do they face in delivering it, and 4) how does your brand of product help or hinder them in delivering it.

Like running the bases in baseball, the questions can take many forms to fit the situation and your style, but they should generally follow the above order.

The goal of walking the gemba is understanding the value stories of everyone in your Customer Lifecycle.

You’ll probably need to run the bases several times with each person to cover all of their responsibilities.

When interviewing, keep in mind it’s a gemba walk. The goal is simply to understand, “What is going on?”  It’s not a dialogue or an exchange of ideas. You’re not trying to reach an agreement. And it’s certainly not a sales call.