New Product Development

New Product Development (NPD) Methodology is designed to enable the expeditious development of products and services to ensure market delivery. The methodology will help the product manager and team in systematically understanding the customer’s requirements, needs & wants, as well as their current competitive position.  It leverages a logical and stage-gated process for product design, manufacturing, and management. Combined with agile project management tools, mechanisms and deliverables.

Best Practice Implementation Considerations

The NPD Methodology utilizes a five step control-gate approach to defining product management deliverables, and is customizable to each individual project effort.  The stage-gated and customizable approach delineates and defines the distinct discovery, definition, design, build, and validation stages of the project.  This staged approach is further augmented with distinct control gate processes at the end of each of the first five product development stages.  The Control Gate process ensures that the proper due diligence has been exercised at each individual stage, and that adequate product, design and definition has been reached prior to release to the next development stage.  This approach is scalable and applicable across all project, product, and industry types.

• Discovery
• Definition
• Design
• Build
• Validation

Best Practice Summary

The use of a deliverable-driven methodology along with sound product and project management judgment makes for a positive and accountable combination.  The best practice/methodology described here will compliment any Agile Project Management effort and can be leveraged as advisory or training solutions within a scaled enterprise environment.

The approach has been successfully used in varied industries around the world to meet “time to market” goals.  By blending an understanding of project management, organization development, Agile/agile, and cross-industry NPD allows us to craft solutions that are real-world and effective.