Engineering Value into Products and Services

Abstract

A component of increasing value to customers is the interactions that a customer has with the seller both before and after sales transactions. However, many products do not include features within the design of the product that enable a continuing stream of interactions. This is not due to inferior work by design engineers. Rather, most requirements provided to development teams are product-centric and do not address the relationship interactions that occur between the seller and customer. There are no requirements for creating or enabling a steady stream of customer interactions. Development teams create designs based upon the requirements they are given. Product-development methodologies restrict the development teams so that the designs they create do not include features that are not found in the design requirements. Transforming design requirements to include these features will lead to a dimension of customer value creation that can be operationally managed for competitive advantage.