Your happiest, biggest customers are satisfied because your product already works for them. The most valuable insights for innovation and growth come from understanding your non-customers—the people not buying from you. Their unmet needs represent your largest untapped opportunities.

By sharing its innovation with distribution partners early, Pella earned their enthusiasm. This resulted in partners offering to showcase the new product in their own booths at the International Builder Show, dramatically increasing Pella's presence and impact beyond its single, small booth.

Handoffs from innovation to product development teams are risky. To ensure the original vision and user insights were maintained, Pella had key innovation team members stay with the project in a consulting capacity through the commercialization and marketing phases.

While interviews yielded feature ideas, observing inspectors in the field ("ride-alongs") revealed the true bottleneck: hours spent writing reports at home. This insight allowed Spectora to ignore superficial requests and focus on the core workflow efficiency problem, which became their key marketing pillar.

To break through industry blindness, Pella created a two-person research team with opposing perspectives: a long-tenured internal engineer and an industrial designer with experience from other top companies. This "oil and water" dynamic was key to their success.

Users often develop multi-product workarounds for issues they don't even recognize as solvable problems. Identifying these subconscious behaviors reveals significant innovation opportunities that users themselves cannot articulate.

Beyond the major process change, Pella's new system incorporated small design features to improve the installer experience. Audible clicks on brackets and clear "Do Not Tape" imprints provided confidence and eliminated common, costly installation errors.

The game-changing insight wasn't a new idea, but an observation of how installers were already "hacking" the process. They were forcing an exterior-designed product to be installed from the inside for safety. Pella simply designed a system that formalized and optimized this behavior.

Historically, Pella addressed installation issues by trying to "fix the installer" with more training. Their successful innovation stemmed from a crucial mindset shift: the problem wasn't the user's process, but a product that was fundamentally designed incorrectly for their real-world needs.