One pitfall in product development is a tendency for developers to expend significant amounts of time, effort, and money on the technical aspects of the project, but leave to informal evaluation the selection of products that will be evaluated in business decision-making marketing research tests. The poor record of success of such an approach necessitates the development of a better system. Research-guidance testing has two primary goals, to provide (1) information concerning how acceptable prototypes are, and (2) direction concerning “next steps.” A systematic approach is needed that provides developers with frequent, inexpensive, quickly executed, and accurate (that is, predictive of business decision-making test criteria) evaluations of prototypes. A rationale and program for obtaining consumer feedback and of integrating this information in a systematic fashion with product development from early concept/product screening stages through early development to the product-optimization stage are described, along with several examples of how the system operates.