Testing Subjective Bias in the Analysis of the Customer Needs

Collecting and grouping customer needs and constraints by similarity are essential steps in market-driven product development. This paper introduces an overall procedure to collect and structure customer needs and constraints with the emphasis on grouping customer needs by similarity. In particular, this paper applies a statistical methodology (Subjective Clustering) to test for an indication that a few participants’ opinions (information) dominate the others’ when grouping customer needs using the consensus-based method (Affinity Diagram). Biased use of participants’ information may lead to clusters inaccurately representing customer needs, which this paper defines as “subjective bias.” Using both Affinity Diagram and Subjective Clustering, one can test and correct the subjective bias while maintaining strong buy-in of the clusters by the participants.