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August 17, 2019 By alexjcooper

Decisions, Decisions: Which products to develop? What resources to invest? 3 key steps to strategic roadmapping

Decisions, Decisions: Which products to develop? What resources to invest? 3 key steps to strategic roadmapping

PlanningProduct innovation is rarely a no-brainer. No company can afford to try every new idea or technology that comes along. Customer needs are always changing, hard data is often lacking, and timing is critical. Yet growth requires risk — and action before opportunities slip away.

The question is, which risk(s) are most worth taking and how do you justify the investment? 

Many companies have found answers through product and technology roadmapping. When done correctly, roadmapping helps product developers make better decisions and forge more effective development strategies.  

According to Dr. Jay Paap, one of the world’s foremost innovation experts, it all starts with information. His Customer Focused Technology Planning® (CFTP) framework, used successfully by many top companies, is based on the collection and distillation of information. Organizations need to find out what customers value, what competitors are doing, and what technologies are out there – now and in the future. Too often companies aren’t sure what to ask and which information is truly relevant. 

So we asked Jay for a quick ‘how-to’ on gathering the right information to build a solid roadmap. Here are his answers:

1. What specific information should you gather?  

 Jay: The four main information-gathering questions to ask are:

  • What is really driving customer behavior? Use traditional approaches like market research and VOC, but also others like forecasting, problem research, lead user, leverage or Kano analysis, or ethnography.   
  • What are the technology options – current and future? Have a scouting mindset to find others with similar problems, inventory other industries, monitor what’s going on in government and university labs and the entrepreneurial community.
  • What is the competitive environment? What others are doing or hope to do. How you can time your activities strategically. Who potential partners or competitors might be. What resources you need and where/whom to acquire them from.
  • What is your company’s strategy? Gather internal information about goals, constraints, resources, values, and risk tolerance.

2. Who owns this information and how do you use it to make the right decisions?

Jay: The information can be anywhere.  We typically go to Marketing for customer information, R&D for technology information, Strategy for trends and competitors, etc. While these groups may be in the best position to manage these flows, what really drives innovation is the involvement of all major functions in the processing of the information into usable inputs into planning. To make informed decisions, everyone needs to have the same vocabulary. Assessment becomes cross-functional. When people share raw information, it keeps them honest and purposeful. When information is abstracted or summarized; the richness is gone and innovative insights often get short-circuited. The process involves piecing together customer information, competitive intelligence, technology information, and assessing opportunities in terms of your strategy. Innovation planning typically involves 15-20 people taking two days to share information, create landscape maps summarizing the key factors affecting innovation, and then jointly developing ideas for innovative products and services. The activity can be eye-opening. Marketing and engineering frequently gain a completely new appreciation and understanding.

3. How do you know which customer needs are the right ones to focus on? Customers rarely identify or articulate the ones that ultimately change the game.

Jay: There are six different techniques I use for identifying customer needs, and only one involves asking the customer what they want!  Dick Davis at Whirlpool, for example, anticipated the customer demand for wash-and-wear cycles not through VOC type techniques, but by looking at environmental factors affecting what customers would want, specifically, the emergence of new fabrics requiring new ways of washing.  The idea is to gather information on the customer as well as from the customer.  Also gather competitive intelligence on external trends and new technologies. Innovation happens when you can anticipate customer needs even before customers know them.

For a brief overview of the CFTP framework and how it works, click here.

For further insight:

Jay Paap’s acclaimed two-day course Product & Technology Roadmapping for Future Growth will be offered October 21-22, 2019 at MIT in Endicott House in Dedham, MA. Participants receive templates, examples, and individualized action steps as well as access to Jay for implementation questions after the class has ended.  

Filed Under: General

December 5, 2018 By alexjcooper

How You Can Take Advantage of Machine Learning to Enhance Your Product AND Process

How You Can Take Advantage of Machine Learning to Enhance Your Product AND Process

Exclusive Webinar

December 13, 2018 

at 2:30pm EST
  • How you can take advantage of ML today to enhance innovation and improve your new product development.

  • How managing ML programs is different and how to change your process to derive full benefit.

  • How to enhance your career by supporting or leading ML programs.

Taking advantage of the benefits of Data Science is no longer just for companies like Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google (FAANG) – we will show you how to leverage the benefits in your company.

In this 60 minute, interactive webinar led by John Carter of TCGen, you will learn how to enhance your product definition and increase innovation by incorporating ML in the ‘augmented product’ to extend beyond the core.  You will also hear real examples of how companies use ML strategically for process management and decision-making to cut time and cost .
Examples include:

  • How very large AND very small businesses have leveraged ML (outside of FAANG)
  • Why program management and software tools makers see great potential
  • How you need to make non-obvious modifications to adapt your development process
  • How to get a head start in your ML journey by bootstrapping expertise, data sets, and algorithms
  • How to move into this exciting field as a career.

The session will cover the key areas where ML is making inroads today and why it is not hype. This is an excellent opportunity for program managers, engineers, marketers, and managers to listen together and determine next steps.

We encourage you to bring your own experiences (and questions) into the discussion and receive expert feedback. The session will be a 45-minute presentation with 15 minutes interactive Q&A.

Reserve Your Space Today

John Carter also offers services that help organizations with program management.

Filed Under: Webinar Tagged With: Innovation, John Carter, Machine Learning, Process

July 6, 2018 By alexjcooper

Ask the Stage-Gate Expert – Dr. Cooper Answers Your Top Questions

Ask the Stage-Gate Expert – Dr. Cooper Answers Your Top Questions

Are speed to market, fast-changing customer needs, and insufficient resources a challenge in your organization? If so, an Agile Stage Gate approach could help. This approach works for physical products and is faster and more flexible than traditional stage-gate. Plus, it can fit within your current set up – no need to buy or overhaul anything. However, implementation is not a slam-dunk, and many of you have asked us what to do. So we turned to Dr. Robert Cooper, the world’s leading authority on Agile Stage Gate, for answers. Here are two of the most common questions we have received — watch this page for more to come.  And please feel free to email your questions for Dr. Cooper to alex@roundtable.com; we’ll send you his reply.

Question #1:  Are there still gates in an Agile-Stage-Gate system? What is their role?

Dr. Cooper:  Yes, gates play a vital role in Agile-Stage-Gate. They are not only a quality check-point, they are a resource commitment decision. They allow senior management to periodically review the project, kill weak projects and reallocate resources to better initiatives. Most importantly, they ensure enough resources are committed to complete approved projects in an accelerated fashion.  Gates still have essentially the same Go/Kill criteria as in the traditional gating model – financial criteria such as NPV or scorecards to rate the attractiveness of projects – since investment decisions must still be made. However, the deliverables for each gate are usually leaner, less granular and more flexible than in the classic gating model. Deliverables are also more tangible, such as product designs or rapid prototypes, rather than long reports or slide presentations

Finally, gates allow senior management to track the progress and on-time performance of the project: when to deliver the product on the longer-term horizon scale remains defined and a key part of Agile-Stage-Gate. 

Question #2: How can an Agile-Stage-Gate strategy help manage complexity? (Projects that are uncertain, ill-defined and ambiguous with many tenuous assumptions)  

Dr. Cooper: Most firms’ new product processes emphasize extensive front-end homework to define the product and justify the project before development gets underway. Robust up-front homework and VoC work early in the project are key to new product success (Cooper, 2013), but not all projects are clearly definable. Some highly uncertain projects – those in new markets and using new technologies – will be near impossible to nail down. No amount of VoC work, technical assessment or market analysis will validate all the assumptions prior to the Development stage. Understanding what the customer values and what will work technically only comes about through experimentation.

The rapid sprint-iterations in Agile-Stage-Gate encourage experimentation and testing – build something, test it with the customer and in the lab, and then revise.  In this way, key assumptions are validated and major uncertainties dealt with, but in real time and as the project moves along. Understanding product requirements and envisioning a technical solution does not occur before Development. Instead Agile-Stage-Gate is done as part of the Development and Testing stages of the project – learning on the fly. The new Agile-Stage-Gate hybrid model handles highly complex, ambiguous, ill-defined projects well, and in fact, sees its greatest benefits there.

Filed Under: Agile Development, news Tagged With: Dr. Robert G. Cooper

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Latest News and Insights

  • Decisions, Decisions: Which products to develop? What resources to invest? 3 key steps to strategic roadmapping
  • How You Can Take Advantage of Machine Learning to Enhance Your Product AND Process
  • Ask the Stage-Gate Expert – Dr. Cooper Answers Your Top Questions
  • Selling Risky Projects to Risk Averse Organizations
  • Smart Products of the Future – Game Changers and Differentiators

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