31 Jan 2023
It’s no secret that picking winning products can be tough. When you’re under pressure to deliver growth and meet your innovation targets, there is always the temptation to start working on every idea in the hope that something will deliver. This strategy can work if you have the right new product development process and culture in place. But how do you know if you’re getting the process right? And how can you recognize if you’re getting it wrong?
From my own experience coaching clients on their new product development processes, companies under pressure often build ‘time saving shortcuts’ into their process to improve speed to market and project quantity throughput. These shortcuts can easily compromise the process and cause problems, such as:
Why you need a well running and effective, stage-gate process
A new product development stage-gate process focuses a company’s limited resources on winning opportunities and is the best-in-class approach to solve these issues. However, when businesses are under pressure to deliver, they often ignore the most basic reason for using a stage-gate process in the first place – the stage-gate approach works by doing the required planning and decision-making upfront before the expensive execution work begins. If you skip the planning stage, your business may deliver new products faster, but you can end up with products that don’t deliver growth and working on projects that never end, or even worse, spending millions on equipment you will never use.
How to improve your stage-gate process
The stage-gate process, along with its required planning, shouldn’t be seen as bureaucracy and an obstacle to success, but it can be difficult to make it both simple and effective. Here are two ways you can improve your stage-gate process:
Oliver Wight has been helping companies improve their new product development speed to market and decision-making processes effectively and sustainably for over 50 years. Get in touch with us here to find out how we can help you. For more free resources on this topic, including white papers click here.