To develop insanely great products, it’s imperative to be able to look at the world from multiple viewpoints, or what we like to think of as a number of “eyes.” This range of perspectives enables the people in charge of product development to acquire a greater understanding of the actual market dynamics and to determine a path that maximizes the probability of success. In an ideal world, the head of product development would see the world from these many windows and synthesize these views into one road map that would chart the way to our ultimate destination: customer value creation.

In all, there are seven windows from which to see the marketplace, and as such seven “eyes” are needed to build our “big picture” of product development.

Let’s examine each of these eyes and their corresponding windows: