Tony Ulwick

Biography

Early in my career as a product engineer, I experienced the ultimate professional disappointment: for 18 months I put my heart and soul into creating a product that failed in the marketplace. It was 1984, and I was part of the IBM PCjr development team. We were working on a product that was supposed to revolutionize home computing. In advance of its release, the Washington Post wrote, “the PCjr will quickly become the standard by which all other home computers are measured.” So you can imagine my surprise when instead, the day after we introduced the PCjr, I woke up to read the headlines in the Wall Street Journal declaring, “PCjr is a flop.” I was shocked! As we learned over the next few months, they were right. It was a flop, an embarrassment that cost IBM over a billion dollars and put a blemish on its reputation. The humiliation of failure had a profound effect on me. I was determined to never let that happen again. In the weeks that followed I wondered how the Wall Street Journal had been able to see this correctly, and so quickly. It occurred to me that if we knew what metrics they (and potential customers) were going to use to judge the value of our product well before we introduced it, we would have the opportunity to design our product to address those metrics and achieve a positive result. This set me on a mission: as an engineer and a product planner, I wanted to figure out a way to identify the metrics that customers use to judge the value of newly released products early on in the product planning process. The breakthrough Over the next five years, I studied and tried out many new tools that looked promising, including voice of the customer, quality function deployment (QFD), TRIZ, Six Sigma, and conjoint analysis. I studied everything that was written about these tools and used them in my product planning activities. I conducted hundreds of customer interviews and dozens of quantitative studies. I also worked with IBM statisticians to learn how to best apply conjoint, factor, and cluster analysis to segment markets in a meaningful way. I worked as an internal IBM consultant, using what I learned to help different IBM teams formulate market and product strategies. IBM management was very supportive throughout this process, which is something I appreciate to this day. I was in Sydney, Australia, with an IBM team in 1990 when I had a mental breakthrough. It occurred to me that we could apply Six Sigma principles to innovation if we studied the process that people were trying to execute when they were using a product or service, rather than studying the product itself. Once we made the process the subject of our investigation, we’d be able to break it down and study it in detail. The challenge would be uncovering the metrics that customers use to measure success and value as they go about executing these processes.

Research Interest

 Business & Management