Ideo
MEMORANDUM
TO: Dennis Boyle, Senior Project Leader and Studio Manager
SUBJECT: Visor product, Handspring
Executive Summary
Handspring, the client, is asking IDEO to design Visor product in approximately 10 months. The design needs to be fully compatible and less expensive version of Palm V, development of which took two years. Such short development time would require IDEO to compromise on its proven development process and sacrifice the emphasis on innovation. Further more, Visor needs to be superior to Palm V with an ability to allow adding new functionality easily. Handspring is also making assumptions about the audience of Visor and audience’s price as well as feature preferences, primarily due to its consideration of Visor as a ‘breakthrough’ product. However, analysis suggests Visor to be an incremental product to Palm V (refer exhibit A: category) and caters to different set of audience. Palm V is an emotionally appealing product that commands premium price, while Visor is supposed to be a value product.
Although different products require slight variations in product development process, after thorough scenario and situation analysis (refer exhibit A and B), it is recommended that IDEO should ask Handspring to extend the schedule from 10 months to a more practical schedule that would allow them to follow their ‘proven’ five phase process. An incremental product to market, Visor will be a platform product for Handspring (refer exhibit A: context). Hence it is important to build the product by identifying the correct market segment and integrating needs of the segment with appropriate price (refer ex. A: competition). There will be some disadvantage by not having product in time for Holiday season. However when considering the downside of avoiding market study and diluting IDEO’s famed product development practices, we feel both IDEO and Handspring will loose a chance to introduce a successful product if compromised on the process. (Refer exhibit
TO: Dennis Boyle, Senior Project Leader and Studio Manager
SUBJECT: Visor product, Handspring
Executive Summary
Handspring, the client, is asking IDEO to design Visor product in approximately 10 months. The design needs to be fully compatible and less expensive version of Palm V, development of which took two years. Such short development time would require IDEO to compromise on its proven development process and sacrifice the emphasis on innovation. Further more, Visor needs to be superior to Palm V with an ability to allow adding new functionality easily. Handspring is also making assumptions about the audience of Visor and audience’s price as well as feature preferences, primarily due to its consideration of Visor as a ‘breakthrough’ product. However, analysis suggests Visor to be an incremental product to Palm V (refer exhibit A: category) and caters to different set of audience. Palm V is an emotionally appealing product that commands premium price, while Visor is supposed to be a value product.
Although different products require slight variations in product development process, after thorough scenario and situation analysis (refer exhibit A and B), it is recommended that IDEO should ask Handspring to extend the schedule from 10 months to a more practical schedule that would allow them to follow their ‘proven’ five phase process. An incremental product to market, Visor will be a platform product for Handspring (refer exhibit A: context). Hence it is important to build the product by identifying the correct market segment and integrating needs of the segment with appropriate price (refer ex. A: competition). There will be some disadvantage by not having product in time for Holiday season. However when considering the downside of avoiding market study and diluting IDEO’s famed product development practices, we feel both IDEO and Handspring will loose a chance to introduce a successful product if compromised on the process. (Refer exhibit