Product Development is critical to the business. It determines a company's financial performance and signifies confidence in the future.
Organizations typically define product development in terms of sales or profit growth and ROI. But this rigid view may lead to missed opportunities. Instead, you should define and measure drivers and development milestones that affect the new product pipeline— critical to performance management.
These metrics allow for more opportunities, but also let you know when to "fail fast" to satisfy overall profit or growth goals. Speed to market paired with insight from fast failures is more important than perfection and indecision, and leads to greater success.
Ideally, Product Development should combine many cross-functional requirements, balance risk, learn from failures and then generate a pipeline of timely new products. To aid the process, companies must focus on three key decision areas for performance management:
- The Performance Manager: See the Performance Manager demo for your department.
- Product and portfolio innovation: Which gaps in the product portfolio are addressable with the available resources, and what are the associated risks?
- Product development milestones: How do we manage priorities and timings, and monitor risks as they change during the development process?
- Market and customer feedback: What external verification process will enhance and confirm new product development opportunities?
