Has this happened to you?

• Your top salesperson and one of the execs just had dinner with a key customer. They came back with the conviction that they could double sales to that customer--but only if they can deliver two truckloads of product within six weeks (just in time for the customer’s new product launch). By the way, it needs to have multiple features you have never made before.
• Very quietly, and off the radar, engineering has been working on a new variant of the product that would allow you to enter a completely new market. A recent skunkworks test has resulted in some really exciting results in properties that would make the product viable for applications in mass-production with huge financial upside. You have no idea if the results can be duplicated and absolutely no concept how you would manufacture or distribute.
• Finance and operations got together and had a great idea to change the material vendor to a new vendor from southeast Asia. This could be a 30% reduction in cost but would have an impact on quality that hasn’t been measured. Customers will love the new price but what about the change in quality?

Three great problems as they all could lead to exciting breakthroughs for your business. But how do you evaluate the potential for success of any of them, and how do you choose which to give the higher priority? And how do you know what to do next on any of them? What questions need to be asked and answered? What risks, technical and market, need to be retired? How do you choose between multiple ideas in a way that is data-driven and where everyone buys into the outcomes? If the decision-making process seems arbitrary and lacking structure, you could easily end up with disgruntled employees and internal discord at times when you really need everyone pulling together.

The good news is that there are time-tested methods to weigh these opportunities and prioritize which to work on and in which order. These tools help to identify the likely market acceptance of your proposed innovation and potential return on your investment. They can help pinpoint what information you need to gather to validate product concepts and provide an early indication of market acceptance, technical risks (both development and in manufacturing), and commercial challenges (channel, competition, etc.).

One of the things we frequently hear from smaller and from newly established businesses is that they feel that they are too small to need formal processes for product lifecycle management. Our experience has shown us that the opposite is true. There is a case to be made that it is better to start a business with the discipline that you would want to have as you grow – easier to get it right first time than to come back and fix mistakes later. However, the bigger reason to implement some form of product life cycle (PLC) process from an early stage of your company or business unit development is that it is at this point that your resources are the most precious, and it is at this point that picking the wrong path could have major, possibly fatal, implications.

To alleviate concerns about creating unnecessary complexity and extra work, a functioning PLC process can start as a very simple list of questions that makes sure the concerns of key stakeholders are understood early in the process. The result of asking these questions is to highlight the unknowns and then put into place a process to gather the missing information. With a more complete set of information in hand, assessing each opportunity with an objective scorecard enables the most promising options to rise to the top of the list through a non-biased process, while achieving group consensus. This “PLC-lite” approach can be very simply constructed and executed with little bureaucracy and delay.

At MarketOperandi, we make it our business to help companies build processes to answer these questions with the right amount of rigor, empowering them to move on to the next stage of growth. Drawing from our collective experience, we design t lifecycle management tools that provide enough detail at each stage and involve all the critical stakeholders, without overburdening the team or stifling the creative process. We have all used these tools in highly successful businesses as independent business owners or as executives running divisions of medium to large companies.

Why not give us a chance to understand the challenges you face in building and running product pipelines to see if we can help? Investing an hour of your time could greatly streamline your product development process.

How will you guide the growth of your company?

You’re Ready. But Are You Really?