Citation (IEEE): J. R. Hauser and D. Clausing, “The House of Quality,” Harvard Business Review, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 63–73, May 1988.
What it argues
Introduces Western managers to quality function deployment through its central planning matrix, the house of quality. The authors show how customer attributes, their importance and competitive perceptions are linked to measurable engineering characteristics, with a “roof” exposing trade-offs and a “basement” holding targets. They argue that the method’s greatest value is cross-functional communication: marketing, engineering and manufacturing plan together from the customer’s point of view.