Develop the product concept or analyze your company or product through the following sections:

1. Identifying Customer Needs (5%): The goal of this activity is to understand customers' needs and to effectively communicate them to the development team. The output of this step is a set of carefully constructed customer need statements, organized in a hierarchical list, with importance weightings for many or all the needs. Special attention is paid to the identification of latent needs, which are difficult for customers to articulate and unaddressed by existing products.
2. Establishing Target Specifications (5%): Specifications provide a precise description of what a product must do. They are the translation of the customer needs into technical terms. Target specifications are set early in the process and represent the hopes of the development team. Later, these specifications are refined to be consistent with the constraints imposed by the team's choice of a product concept. The output of this stage is a list of target specifications. Each specification consists of a metric and marginal and ideal value for that metric.
3. Concept Generation (5%): The goal of concept generation is to thoroughly explore the space of product concepts that may address the customer needs. Concept generation includes a mix of external search, creative problem-solving within the team, and systematic exploration of the various solution fragments the team generates. The result of this activity is usually a set of 10 to 20 concepts, each typically represented by a sketch and brief descriptive text.
4. Concept Selection (5%): Concept selection is the activity in which various product concepts are analyzed and sequentially eliminated to identify the most promising concepts. The process usually requires several iterations and may initiate additional concept generation and refinement. You are required to describe why and how you decided on the concept selected.
5. Concept Testing (5%): One or more concepts are then tested to verify that the customer needs have been met, assess the market potential of the product, and identify any shortcomings that must be remedied during further development. If the customer response is poor, the development project may be terminated, or some earlier activities may be repeated as necessary.
6. Benchmarking of Competitive Products (5%): An understanding of competitive products is critical to the successful positioning of a new product and can provide a rich source of ideas for the product and production process design. Competitive benchmarking is performed in support of many of the front-end activities.