Engineering Milkshake Mistakes

Author Clay Shirky, tells the following story in his new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (2010) - -

When McDonald’s wanted to improve sales of its milkshakes, it hired researchers to figure out what characteristics its customers cared about. Should the shakes be thicker? Sweeter? Colder? Almost all the researchers focused on the product. But one of them, Gerald Berstell, chose to ignore shakes themselves and study the customers instead. He sat in a McDonald’s for eighteen hours one day, observing who bought milkshakes and at what time. One surprising discovery was that many milkshakes were purchased early in the day - - odd, as consuming a shake at eight A.M. plainly doesn’t fit the bacon-and-eggs model of breakfast. Berstell also garnered three other behavioral clues from the morning milkshake crowd: the buyers were always alone, they rarely bought anything besides a shake, and they never consumed the shakes in the store.

The breakfast-shake drinkers were clearly commuters, intending to drink them while driving to work. The behavior was readily apparent, but the other researchers had missed it because it didn’t fit the normal way of thinking about either milkshakes or breakfast. As Berstell and his colleagues noted in “Finding the Right Job for Your Product,” their essay in the Harvard Business Review, the key to understanding what was going on was to stop viewing the product in isolation and to give up traditional notions of the morning meal. Berstell instead focused on a single, simple question: “What job is a customer hiring that milkshake to do at eight A.M.?”

If you want to eat while you are driving, you need something you can eat with one hand. It shouldn’t be too hot, too messy, or too greasy. It should also be moderately tasty, and take a while to finish. Not one conventional breakfast item fits that bill, and so without regard for the scared traditions of the morning meal, those customers where hiring the milkshake to do the job they need done.

Engineering has its moments of “milkshake mistakes” - - moments where it missed some of the points that researchers and keen observers like Berstell are able to see. Our engineering “milkshake mistakes” boils down to problems in two areas. The first is a concentration on the product or the thing - - where engineering and engineers assume that everything important about "the thing" was somehow implicit in its attributes, without regard to what role the customers wanted it to play. The fallacy of not understanding the job they were hiring the milkshake for. The second is a narrowness of thought with respect to a particular product and the systems and forces that intersect with the product. It is adopting a narrow view of the type of food people have always eaten in the morning, as if all habits were deeply rooted traditions instead of accumulated accidents. Neither the shake itself nor the history of breakfast mattered as much as customers needing food to do a nontraditional job - - serve as sustenance and amusement for their morning commute - - for which they hired a milkshake.

Engineering “milkshake mistakes” fundamentally goes to the heart of two important design thinking attributes - - the ability to clearly see the world and the ability to place what you see into the proper context.