The rise of the world wide web along with advancements in the various fields of technology has opened the doors to faster innovation cycles. It has also proved to be a challenging environment for new product development in recent history. If organizations want to compete well, they can no longer afford the luxury of developing new products at their own will and wish.
Note that the market needs that your product is meant to satisfy as well as the technologies required to address them can change dramatically – and this is today’s reality!
What does this mean for product-based enterprises?
Across the board, functions such as marketing, product portfolio management, procurement & supply chain, finance, and infrastructure need to give up a relaxed approach. Instead, they need to become nimble and fast-paced.
What about changing the new product development process from a traditional approach to agile practices such as Scrum? Isn’t adopting agile methods to evaluate products & projects, prototypes, plan and execute project delivery not adequate?
Let us get some clarity here.
Agile-based new product development using Scrum, Kanban, etc., suggests the mindset required along with an emphasis on nimble processes. It is for business leaders and enterprises to convert the above frameworks into results.
New product development teams struggle starts here!
As an organization offering products in different industries and market segments, how do we empower the teams to be ‘agile in spirit’ yet provide a platform or a solution that is flexible to the needs of individual product development teams?
It is a catch 22 situation! Want to have the cake and eat it too!
You must be wondering if it is possible or even feasible. Some hard observations that could justify your views are listed below.
- How can we allow product designers to sense customer needs continually?
- How can we test alternative solutions?
- How can we integrate the acquired knowledge into a coherent design?
The above points are entirely valid!
The question confronting enterprises that are into new product development is simple. Do we continue to crib about the nature of product development or do something about it that enables corporate ‘survival’ and ‘profitable growth’?
I am sure you choose survival and profitable growth!
Now that the choice is made, how should organizations go about new product development? Some of the pointers in this directions are outlined below.
1. Understand and map your products according to industry and customer category.
2. Document the high-level new product development map for each product category.
3. Define broad-level decision-making and workflow protocols for each product category.
4. Analyse and set high-level processes for new product development.
5. Allow new product development teams the flexibility to experiment and alter specific processes as per particular product needs.
6. Define organizational governance mechanisms for project reviews.
Firms need to build flexibility into their new product development by addressing both product evolution and its application context jointly. The speed of such an integration shall determine the pace of responding to changes in the product’s environment.
It is pertinent to note that the value of flexible new product development is only as good as the quality of the process deployed.
TouchBase® for new product development is designed to address the critical enterprise need for flexibility and governance that enterprises need for sustained profitable growth.
Join the league of successful companies that have deployed TouchBase® for managing their end-to-end new product development cycle.
