 Today we're going to talk about something super nerdy called a QFD. QFD stands for Quality Function Deployment, which I think is about the worst name of anything I've ever heard. You know I love a good spreadsheet and I love metrics, so this is going to be really fun. Imagine you need to make a decision between several different options. There's a lot of different criteria on which you might base that decision, and each of the different options meets that criteria in different ways, some better, some worse. With a QFD, you define those criteria, then you decide how well each of your different options meet that criteria. In order to do that, you assign a value to it, a 1, a 3, or a 9. And I'll show you why it's 1, 3 and 9 and not just 1, 2, 3. In addition, you look at how important each of those criteria are to you. That's separate from how well the options meet it, it's what's actually important to you, what are the most important and least important things in your list of criteria. Those also get a value of 1, 3, or 9. There are people out there who live and breathe for QFDs, and they know that there's a lot more to QFDs than what I'm going to show you here. This is sort of the very simplest possible form you could do a QFD. This is going to make a lot more sense when you see how it works, and we're going to do a demonstration of a QFD using the decision of which MacBook you want to get, a 12-inch MacBook, a 13-inch MacBook Air, or a 13-inch MacBook Pro. In this QFD example, I'm going to show how you could decide between a 12-inch MacBook, a 13-inch MacBook Air, and a 13-inch MacBook Pro. The first thing we needed to do was come up with a criteria against which we're going to judge these three computers, and I've listed them here. Now you may think of other criteria that you would find important, and you could add those to this, but these are the ones I did just to start. So we're going to look at the retina screen, weight, speed, RAM, disk, force touch price, iSight camera, and multiple ports against each one of these types of computers. The first thing you do is you assign the objective value for that product. Now this isn't really an opinion as much as it is a fact. We have the retina screen, and I'm going to judge the 12-inch MacBook about how well does it meet that criteria? Well, it meets it perfectly. It has a retina screen. Therefore, it gets the highest possible value, which is a 9. If we look at the 13-inch MacBook Air, however, it does not have a retina screen, so we're going to give it a value of 1, and you'll see I've added some notes here so we can look at how I decided the values of each of these. So this isn't something subjective, this is simply a fact. The MacBook Air must get a 1 on whether it has a retina screen or not. Likewise, the MacBook Pro gets a 9 because it does have the retina screen. Now the next line for weight, you might be able to have some argument with me because I'm going to give the 12-inch MacBook a 9 because it only weighs 2.03 pounds and I gave the MacBook Air a 3 because it weighs 2.38 pounds. You might not think that's enough of a difference to say it shouldn't also get a 9, which is the best value you could give it. In this case though, I have held both of them in my hands and that 17% difference is surprisingly noticeable. Finally, the MacBook Pro is the most heavy at 3.48 pounds, quite heavy in comparison, so it's going to get a 1. Now I did put something across the top here where I said all of the objective values are for the maximum available option. So when you get down into speed and RAM and disk, I looked at each one of these for the best you could possibly buy it. On the criteria of price, I decided to look at the least expensive models because that was what you would be looking for if you were judging price, if you were price conscious. After you have finished assigning the criteria and assigning the objective values to the things you're comparing, the next thing you would do is you would put in the subjective value to you. So a retina screen is that important to you? If it's super important to you, you give it a 9. If it's kind of important, you give it a 3. And if you could care less, you would give it a 1. I promised up front that I would explain why it's a 1.3.9. And I'll show you why when you put a value in here. Let's put a value of a 9. I'm going to hit Enter. And you'll see that the MacBook gets an 81, the 13-inch MacBook Air gets a 9, and the 13-inch MacBook Pro gets an 81. The values have dramatically spread apart. So if this were the only thing you were judging it on, you could see that the MacBook and the MacBook Pro are highly desirable items versus the MacBook Air to you. Again, this is the value to you. Each one of these is multiplied out. So let's change this up a little bit. Let's give this a weight itself. Let's give it a value of 1. So you can see 1 times 9 is 9. 1 times 3 is 3. And 1 times 1 is 1 on the MacBook Pro. So let's just keep dropping those in. Let's just randomly go 3, 9, 1, 1. I'm going to try to put a 4 in and watch what happens. I got an error signal there because I didn't put in the right value. We'll put in 3, 1, and 9. When you get all done, you can tell that with the values that I put down as important to me, the right answer here is that I should get a 13-inch MacBook Pro. My next likely candidate would be the 12-inch MacBook and finally the 13-inch MacBook Air. But you can see that by using a 1, 3, and 9 to evaluate the criteria and then a 1, 3, and 9 for how important those are to you, the correct answer simply jumps out at you as a dramatically higher number. And that is how a QFD works. I thought some of you might enjoy playing around with this QFD, especially those of you who might want some help trying to decide which MacBook to buy. And so I've created a short link to the Google Doc and you should be able to change the subjective values to what you like and watch how the spreadsheet changes. Have fun with this and if you'd like to see more of my work, please head on over to podfeat.com and check out the No Silicast podcast.