Understanding customer needs/problems is important to understand what value means to the customer. Stephanie Westphal will show how this is the prime task developing concepts for stage 1 of the Tennant NPI process. She will demonstrate her experiences making development projects flow downstream from this important first step. She will show how her teams overcome the typical problems to make their deadlines: customer interests that change during the project timeline, decisions not made promptly, and team members having unplanned work.