Which new products are right for your business? Ask your customers

Q: How do businesses discover which new products they should develop for their customers?

A: Get a team together with varying perspectives and focus on your customers' or users' experience. The process of design thinking applies here.

Design thinking, also called human-centered design, begins with understanding the human needs your product will meet. It begins with the discovery process and has five steps: Empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test.

When I teach design thinking, I send my students out to interview potential customers. They start with three questions: What problem are we trying to solve? How do people solve the problem now? How do people respond when introduced to an idea for the solution? Listen to how people think, feel and behave. Remember that you aren't selling your idea at this stage; you are listening to learn.

Empathize with the customer to understand what is needed to solve a problem. In design thinking, we need to set assumptions aside and understand the human need for a product. Write down a summary of the feedback. Summarize and analyze what you have learned. Then define the problem you are trying to solve in one sentence. Analyze the information from multiple perspectives: design, marketing, production, financing and, most importantly, users.

Once your team has an idea, build an inexpensive and imperfect prototype. Test it with prospective customers. Ask three questions: What do you like most? What don't you like? What change would you make to the design? Refine the prototype and keep taking it back to customers. Each question helps you to refine your product and pitch.

The testing phase often leads you to redefine the problem more acutely. As the solution is refined, continue to test it by interviewing potential customers. Because you have an existing company and, therefore, an existing customer base, when the idea is refined, conduct a simple online survey to gauge market interest before going to production. Successful entrepreneurs remind us to seek out skeptics. Get beyond the friendly feedback and always be willing to learn.

Laura Dunham is the associate dean of the Schulze School of Entrepreneurship and a professor of entrepreneurship specializing in design thinking at the University of St. Thomas.