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Category Archives: Process

Get small to improve time to market

Small batches will help you improve time to market, read the difference  between the traditional and non-traditional approach to product development below. Traditional approach to product development (Batches of major activities) In a traditional phased-and-gated system, each phase is a batch of activities that has to be completed in order to produce a set of…
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Act Like A Chef When Developing Products

The goal of product development is to create a “recipe” for producing a product[i], a final result that is sold to customers. The recipe for a tangible product would specify the ingredients, the materials and components to be used. The steps of the recipe use specific amounts of ingredients with specific methods requiring certain labor,…
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Why You Should Use Prototypes

Why Use Prototypes Why do you use prototypes? To better understand the customer? To determine whether the technology works? To see whether your product concept is manufacturable? All of these are valid reasons to use prototypes during product development. However, sometimes companies wait until late in development to collect feedback. They often think the prototype…
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How to decrease the paperwork you loathe in product development

“Too much paperwork!” is the one of the most common and most passionate complaints we hear from our clients. The project team loathes creating it and the decision-makers loathe reading it. They don’t see the value. Yet typical product development processes requires voluminous documentation. Why so much paperwork? 1st…to make sure nothing is overlooked, the…
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Hurry Up and Wait – Pitfalls of the Phased and Gated Process

A phased-and-gated system creates multiple batches that slows down the overall speed of a product development project. The group of phased activities is a batch that has to be completed in order to produce a set of deliverables, which is another batch for review and decision at a gate. Reinertsen indicates the problem is that…
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The Myth of Doubling Down

It is tempting, when witnessing a failure of product development, to blame the people. Why? Because the company has invested substantial resources installing a product development process that follows the best practices of the day. They probably also installed an expensive software tool that promised to streamline the process. On top of that, they trained…
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