CLIENT CHALLENGE

• Develop a long-term product road map.
• Ensure market acceptance of products.

CLIENT RESULTS

• Uncovered previously unknown information about customer's purchasing criteria and unmet needs.
• Adapted product road map to better address customer issues.
• Institutionalized the product development process to ensure continuation of MDPD's thorough and measurable approach.

PDC SOLUTION

• Market-Driven Product Definition (MDPD®)

Facing the increasingly cost competitive and time-pressured environments of healthcare and research, Bio-Rad's Clinical Diagnostic Group turned to PDC to enhance the company's methods for developing a long-term product road map.

Since the group's diagnostic kit products typically undergo a three-year development cycle, the company needed to be confident that the features and specifications earmarked for development would be attractive to the customer five to eight years in the future.

PDC led a multi-disciplined team through the Market-Driven Product Definition (MDPD) process, teaching team members all of the elements so that they could continue the process independently. By learning how to conduct in-depth customer interviews, the team also uncovered latent needs that resulted in an entirely new slant to a future product. Using MDPD, Bio-Rad discovered that certain features originally thought to be very important to customers were, in fact, much less or not at all important to them. These findings dramatically altered the course of development.

In addition to consensus building, a cornerstone of this approach, PDC's MDPD process helped the team to identify and make educated trade-off decisions regarding product definition characteristics. This helped build a stronger product road map and a product that was readily accepted by the target audience.