Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously

by Jeff Gothelf

A few years ago, design researcher Jared Spool studied teams to see what effect exposure to customers had on product success. According to the study he published in 2011, teams that met with real customers for at least two hours per team member every six weeks produced superior products.12 In the study, Spool calls this key metric exposure hours, or the number of hours that each member of the team is exposed to customers. This last point is important. Teams that do a lot of research but in which only research specialists participate do not see this improvement in product quality. The second key point in the study is that the research can’t be done only once. It has to be done continuously; the study found a frequency of at least every six weeks to be the magic number.