Individual Submission 5 Ishaat Zahidi 1811143

House of Quality

Steve Jobs: Chapter 12, 26

1. The product design marks the beginning of the customer experience. Therefore, it is important
that there is a strong inter-functional collaboration among design, marketing and manufacturing
section and hence among the staffs of those. House of quality is one such conceptual map that
enables the collaboration.
2. Building a house comprises of multiple steps. The initial step is to identify the need and
expectations of a customer from a product. This step is performed by studying the word and
phrase associations of a product by the customers.
3. The next step is to prioritize the needs by considering the importance of each of them. This helps
the designers trade off one over other. This step helps the designers make an informed decision
by knowing the importance of benefits to the customers.
4. For an organization, it is also important to gain a competitive advantage out of developing a
product. So, it is imperative for the companies to measure the competitive advantage that they
gain out of delivering the benefits that the customers are looking for. This helps them recognize
areas where the advantage can be important.
5. One of the important steps is to establish a relationship between customer expectations and
Engineering characteristics (EC). This makes the company identify the Engineering characteristics
that have a direct impact on the customers.
6. The last but main step is to identify the types of other changes that would be the resultant of the
Engineering change. This will help the firm analyse the effort needed vs the benefits it will provide.
It may happen that a product feature can bring about multiple negative changes in the product
and as a result the product might lose out on the user experience. In that case, it is recommended
not to include that feature into the product.
7. The relationship matrix defines the degree of influence of the engineers on the customer
perceived qualities. This also explains how much each engineering characteristics affect customer
attributes.
8. Steve Jobs aesthetic taste comes into picture in Chapter 12. Jobs wanted the design to be
minimalist yet sleek. The Mac went through multiple iterations each attempting to improve on
what Jobs critiqued. At one point, Jobs rejected the engineer’s design of the Mac calculator
program and the engineer developed a calculator construction set for Jobs to explore and choose
from the various available options the aspects that provide the best customer experience and
fulfils all the customer needs. In this case, Jobs can be considered as the customer who is voicing
his opinion about the product and how other teams are designing the product based on those
attributes.
9. Steve Jobs and John Ive both understood the importance of packaging, and both of their names
are listed on the patents for a variety of innovative packages for Apple products. They became
friends as they both cared about design, especially minimalism. Ive particularly appreciated Jobs’
philosophy that design comes first.
10. House of Quality is an awesome mechanism to ensure low pre-launch delays and low after launch
changes in a product. However, it requires a lot of effort to execute this procedure. Some of the
problems that can creep in this case are human biases and procedural delays. So, thinking and
working together becomes essential to gain maximum advantage out of this tool.
11. House of quality certainly breaks down functional barriers and encourages teamwork. The
principal benefit of the House of quality is quality in house. It makes people think in the right
directions and encourages group thinking. This alone can create a revolution for many companies.