Upgrade Your New-Product Machine

OVERVIEW:Where a company's new product development process is inferior to its manufacturing process, in terms of defect rate and overall effectiveness, a process called New Product Blueprinting can help its managers to close the gap. This process is a means of upgrading the “fuzzy front end” of new-product development. It builds on the Stage-Gate process and forces an “outside-in” perspective by fully engaging customers in a set of discovery and preference interviews. Guesswork is taken out of product design by using tools such as Market Satisfaction Gap, a measure of customer eagerness for each product attribute. The entire four-phase process—market segmentation, customer interviews, competitive benchmarking and new-product planning—allows the product development team to solidify its business case before undertaking costly product development.