Developing great products is hard. Few companies are highly successful more than half the time. These odds present a significant challenge for a product development team. Some of the characteristics that make product development challenging are:
• Trade-offs: An airplane can be made lighter, but this action will probably increase
manufacturing cost. One of the most difficult aspects of product development is recognizing, understanding, and managing such trade-offs in a way that maximizes the success of the product.
• Dynamics: Technologies improve, customer preferences evolve, competitors introduce new products, and the macroeconomic environment shifts. Decision making in an environment of constant change is a formidable task.
• Details: The choice between using screws or snap-fits on the enclosure of a computer can have economic implications of millions of dollars. Developing a product of even modest complexity may require thousands of such decisions.
• Time pressure: Anyone of these difficulties would be easily manageable by itself given plenty of time, but product development decisions must usually be made quickly and without complete information.
• Economics: Developing, producing, and marketing a new product requires a large investment. To earn a reasonable return on this investment, the resulting product must be both appealing to customers and relatively inexpensive to produce. For many people, product development is interesting precisely because it is challenging. For others, several intrinsic attributes also contribute to its appeal:
• Creation: The product development process begins with an idea and ends with the production of a physical artifact. When viewed both in its entirety and at the level of individual activities, the product development process is intensely creative.
• Satisfaction of societal and individual needs: All products are aimed at satisfying needs of some kind. Individuals interested in developing new products can almost always find institutional settings in which they can develop products satisfying what they consider to be important needs.
• Team diversity: Successful development requires many different skills and talents. As
a result, development teams involve people with a wide range of different training, experience,
perspectives, and personalities.
• Team spirit: Product development teams are often highly motivated, cooperative groups. The team members may be colocated so they can focus their collective energy on creating the product. This situation can result in lasting camaraderie among team members.
References and Bibliography
A wide variety of resources for this chapter and for the rest of the book are available on the Internet. These resources include data, templates, links to suppliers, and lists of publications. Current resources may be accessed via www.ulrich-eppinger.net Wheelwright and Clark devote much of their book to the very early stages of product development, which we cover in less detail. Wheelwright, Stephen c., and Kim B. Clark, Revolutionizing Product Development: Quantum Leaps in Speed, Efficiency, and Quality, The Free Press, New York, 1992. Katzenbach and Smith write about teams in general, but most of their insights apply to product development teams as well. Katzenbach, Jon R., and Douglas K. Smith, The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 1993. These three books provide rich narratives of development projects, including fascinating descriptions of the intertwined social and technical processes. Kidder, Tracy, The Soul of a New Machine, Avon Books, New York, 1981.
Sabbagh, Karl, Twenty-First-Century Jet: The Making and Marketing of the Boeing 777, Scribner, New York, 1996. Walton, Mary, Car: A Drama of the American Workplace, Norton, New York, 1997.
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