Product Development Innovation is Everyone's Job

Developing new products is fun and rewarding for your customers who can be more productive and increase their performance. Getting them the right product or service to do the job is the big challenge especially when they only know what they don't like.. They may know what they don't  want and have no clue on how to fix it that will make them happy. That is your job as the creator.

You want to create that new thing that solves a problem that most people in your target customer base profile, really value a good solution. You've pick that direction based on some assumptions on how to get to the right solution and how your customer will respond. You must validate those assumptions with real quantifiable facts as soon as possible.

There are some best practices for product development expressed by  various articles from Harvard Business Review. I have used many of these in my career to cut time to market in half and developed some very successful award winning products.

1. “Make queues and info overflow visible to everyone.” Transparency is key to find bottlenecks quickly. Create key performance indicators (KPIs) that every stakeholder should have input in creating. They all need to know what the values and trends over time mean. Automate updates on a frequent and regular basis.
2. “Quantify and factor the cause delays in your decisions.”
3. “Resource slack where utilization is highest.” (don’t overload your people with tasks to do every minute) self-education, tinkering and recharging are essential in getting the teams’ best performance and maintaining happiness.
4. “Shift focus of control systems from efficiency to quicker response time.”
5. “Reduce transaction cost and time with smaller batches for faster feedback.”
6. “Experiment with small batches.”
7. “Treat the development plan as it will evolve with added information as it becomes available.”
8. “Start projects when ready to make a full commitment.”
9. “Aim for simplicity, investigate what features can be removed…” Do not throw the kitchen sink at that customer hoping the right combo sticks. Know what those potential customers truly value when it comes to functions or services you want to provide.
10. “Experiment early rapidly, frequently with modeling, prototypes in a controlled and customer environment.”
11. “Emphasize overlapping iterative process designs…”
12. “Focus on quick feedback vs doing it right the 1st time. Learn and repeat.”

Let us know what has worked for you and how you got the amazing solution that your customer couldn't wait to use and were delighted when they did. Thanks hope this helps your business.