Designing a new product isn’t hard. Designing a new product that people will buy and like is hard.

The pitfalls:

This is cool! I should use it in a design!

Good projects start with “Here is the problem we want to solve. How do we go about it?” Great projects start with “We will create this product that no-one else thought of and everyone will learn that they need it.” Camera phones are one of my favorite examples. Who ever wanted a camera in their phone until companies started marketing them?

My great idea and your brains and we can make a fortune

The great idea isn’t the hard part.

I have this great product idea that will sell hundreds!

And at a dollar of profit each you can pay your development team for 20 minutes.

Hey We can make it do this too!

I love to figure out how I can make something more complex by adding features. What sells is when you make things simple.

Fire! Ready! Aim! Theory of project management

OK, you built it. What does it do? Is it safe? Can you manufacture it? Doesn’t this thing need some sort of certification?

The Ugly Safety Net: NPI Process

A New Product Introduction (NPI) Process can smooth your path and avoid those pitfalls.  OK, nobody likes processes because they are rigid, full of buzzwords and acronyms and feel like they stifle creativity.  The companies that teach them fill the process with acronyms and exciting titles to make their seminar sound more valuable.

“Get your Black Belt in QSP!” sounds better than “Learn which button to push on the blender for Quality Smoothie Production.”

Remember the Basics

Without the acronyms and buzzwords, most NPI processes are the same.  They break the development cycle into work periods (phases) and decision points (gates) where each phase is a controlled amount of money and time and each gate is designed to show up fatal problems before you have spent the money and time of the next phase. You also know what you are trying to build, and you know when you are ready to ship it.

Go Forward, Go Back, Quit

Choices at a gate are to go forward, go back, or quit.  The most common go back scenario is when a specification or certification doesn’t pass.  Missed a temperature survival?  Go back and evaluate higher temperature materials.  Missed FCC Compliance?  Go back and mitigate EMI/EMC.

Quit can be a heartbreak.  I worked on a product that made it all the way to production tooling before we found out that the distributors wouldn’t carry it because it didn’t fit on their shelves.   We LOVED the product, so it hurt to stop it, but stopping it in pre-production wasn’t as expensive as if we had started shipping.

So how long does it take?

The process time depends on how much is at stake, who needs to be convinced, and how much resources are dedicated.  When I was working in research, we had government agencies to convince and they in turn had to justify the program to their bosses.  The phase cycles would take many years to complete and the gate meetings would be a series of presentations and meetings over weeks. In consumer electronics we would do 3-4 product developments per year (in parallel) and management would complete several gate decisions at a  time.

Two buzzwords.  One Acronym

Phase, Gate, and NPI are as complicated as it gets.  Here is a description of one implementation of phase-gate NPI.

Phase one: Concept

What are you building, what problem does it solve and why do people need it? This is a description of the customer view of the product: what do they see, hear, and feel when they walk up to it? Don’t spend money on figuring out how to do it yet.

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Gate one: Branding

Is it a fit for the company? Is it feasible? This is the Boss Buy in.

Phase Two: Marketing and Business Plan

How much will someone pay for it? What is the potential market quantity? Are there competitors? What time to market is required? How fast can it be duplicated by competitors or how soon will the market be saturated (market life)?

This is also where you start to flush out specifications (again from a user/outside view).

Gate Two: Marketing

Gate two is where Marketing says “We can sell it for that price” and you base a budget on market estimates.

Phase three: Protoype Development

Now you have to figure out how to make it tick AND how to manufacture it.

Refine product requirements with measurable/testable requirements.  “Is it Beautiful” is not testable.  “Is the design approved by Jean-Claude Van Damme in Marketing” is testable.

Begin evaluation of manufacturing, test, and certification requirements, focus group testing, early pre-certification testing.  This means you have to read certification standards and think about how you are going to build and test it.  As much as I hate the legalese of standards, leaving them to the end is costly.

I recently read a standard that referenced Appendix Z subpart B 8.8 (ii). It may as well have said “Beware of the Leopard.”

Gate Three: Go for Production

The project is still on budget, still on time, still marketable, still feasible.  The company is willing to spend money on real tooling and manufacturing.

Phase four Final Product Development

Get your certifications.  Design assembly line test procedures, packaging and user manuals.  Verify and validate all your testable requirements and begin formal marketing to distributors. If you change anything at this phase you should be in formal document control with all those nasty reviews and change orders because you will likely need to redo validation and certifications.

Gate Four: Production Ready

All your certifications and testing have passed.  You have verified and validated all of your specifications.  Marketing has success in getting distributors online and you are still on budget and still on time.

Phase Five: Full Production

Ship it!  Begin full scale production, shipping, sales, and make your money!

NPI Process isn’t the miracle cure

There are pitfalls even to a good NPI process.  Mark Barnett in his article “10 Lessons Learned When Implementing A Stage-Gate® Process For New Product Development” points out some of them.  My favorite is that following a rigorous phase gate process (or process of any sort) can bog you down and interfere with the actual product development, but skipping it altogether can lead to unforeseen expenses and market failure.

Who knew there was a website dedicated to “Resources for Project Managers.

Wikipedia has a more detailed explanation of phase gate NPI processes.

Your process may vary.