A reliable stream of new products or services is essential for the vitality of any organization. To assure a reliable stream, you’ll need a robust New Product Development (NPD) process. “But wait,” you say, “new products are, by definition, different. They don’t lend themselves to the constraints of a process.” So yes, the process must encourage innovation and differentness, but experience has shown that without a solid NPD process, you have three major problems:
- Development times are way too slow.
- You’ll have too much chaos in your engineering group. Inventing new products is, by its very nature, chaotic and unpredictable. That’s a good But too much chaos is damaging.
- You get caught at the end of the cycle with a fatal problem that you could have caught earlier with a good checklist. You have to start over.
Four aspects of a typical NPD Process, from 50,000 feet: