At the ABC Expo, one of the most common requests from members whose booths I visited was for advice on how to create or improve their new product development process. Having a well-designed NPD process can be a powerful source of competitive advantage. You might be surprised to find that even some of the larger companies in the industry have far less than optimum product development methodologies.

But before I talk about the latest and greatest best practices in NPD, it’s important that I remind you of one of the universal principals of management excellence—holistic thinking. Don’t create/fix the parts, create/fix the whole business. Improving product development involves more than just the product development process itself.

Your Business Model

In a recent post (“Is Your Business Model Obsolete?”), I outlined the six components of all business models--Value Proposition, Culture, Channels, Processes, Resources, and Financial Formula.

A properly drafted Value Proposition will dictate what type of product development you need. It defines who your target customers are, what products/categories you will produce, and where your superior value versus competition will come from. For example, you might decide that your competitive advantage will be superior in-use performance. Or, conversely it might be comparable performance at a lower price. You can’t really start to put in place an effective NPD process until you’ve determined these things—in writing.

With respect to Resources, you will need process “performers” who have the appropriate skills for each process step. For example, no matter how good your development process is, if you don’t have people involved who are creative enough to come up with great ideas or access to engineers who can convert the ideas into reality, you’re dead in the water.

And, you better make sure your company’s Culture attracts and retains the right kind of people and supports the behaviors you’ll need. For example, if you want to be an innovator, you’ll want your culture to encourage and reward creative thinking and intelligent risk-taking. 

A Proposed NPD Process Framework   

What follows is an outline of a basic, flexible, 6 stage framework that I believe could be customized to work for the majority of companies in the juvenile industry.

General NPD Process Principles

Of all the common business processes, new product development has probably seen more innovation in best practices over the past 20 years than any other. No doubt this is due to the impact it can have on the bottom line. Here are some generally accepted current principles to help you better understand and use this framework to design your company’s complete process:

·         Dividing the process into stages separated by critical checkpoints for CEO or senior team approval before proceeding to the next step.

·         Performing functions concurrently where possible to save time.

·         Understanding that consumers will generally not tell you what they need but they can recognize a good idea when they see it.

·         Recognition that you need to sift through a large quantity of possible ideas in the “Idea Generation” stage to find one great idea—i.e. you need to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince.

·         The use of observation of consumer behavior as a source of new product ideas—e.g. watching parents putting their baby to bed to gain insights into possible product features.

·         Getting general market and competition input from trade customers (buyers) in the “Design Strategy” stage but not showing concepts to trade customers until you have a final working model at the end of the “Development” stage.

·         Thinking of the “Development” stage as a series of relatively rapid and cost-minimized design—test (with consumers)—learn—redesign iterations where the concept evolves over time rather than being totally defined and financially justified upfront. The idea is to get feedback from consumers early, often, and at as low a cost as possible.

·         Not having an itchy trigger finger but killing projects that are clearly not viable as early as possible.

·         Getting to market quickly—proceeding to “Deployment” and launch with an acceptable but maybe not perfect product and then refining it in later versions (see stage no. 6 “Product Improvement”).

·         Keeping the process simple and bureaucracy at a minimum.

Next Steps

In preparation for introducing a new or improved NPD process in your company, get all those in your company who will be involved in product development, as well as any appropriate outside resources, to talk about and clarify/revise if necessary your Value Proposition, needed Resources, and desired Culture. Once those components are set, you could begin to document your process by simply creating a checklist for each of the 6 stages in the framework. Getting even a basic process in place is far better than having no process at all. You can always get more detailed later.  

If you’d like some guidance or suggestions, you can set up one or more Skype sessions or telephone conferences with me under JPMA’s CEO Mentor Program that benefits K.I.D.S. Contact Kyle Schaller at kschaller@jpma.org.