Companies have to develop innovative and high-quality products faster than their competitors to create temporary monopoly periods with maximum profitability. However, they usually have tight deadlines and limited budgets for new product development projects.
To overcome this challenge, high-performance companies apply a “lean” business analysis, design, and development approach that has its origins in the Toyota car production system.
Lean mainly focuses on eliminating muda (waste) throughout the product development lifecycle (PDLC) and passing resource savings to innovative projects.
Waste elimination can be achieved by injecting the following lean principles into the companies’ DNA:
1. Be Value Oriented
–Focus on producing outcomes (value) rather than outputs (deliverables).
-Always prioritize product features; focus on “must-have” rather than “nice-to- have” ones.
-Eliminate the waste of low-priority product features that are not essential for customers.
- Be Customer Centered
–Be like the sun but not the moon; illuminate yourself with the light of your own customers instead of your competitors. Concentrate on being more responsive to the needs of your target customers instead of benchmarking yourself with your competitors.
-Be customer centric rather than product centric. Consider products not as an objective but as a tool to meet your customers’ needs.
-Develop products around your customers. Always listen closely to the “voice of your customers” throughout PDLC. Set up and maintain a continuous customer feedback loop.
-Ask customers about their needs but not their proposed solutions. Remember Henry Ford’s famous quotation: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
2. Be Iterative
–Start your product development journey with small steps. Think big, but start small.
-Be patient; remember that Rome was not built in a day.
-Move evolutionary rather than revolutionary: Use prototypes to gather early customer feedback. At the initial iteration, release a core version of the product including only high-priority features. In following iterations, use customer feedback from previous releases to refine the product by adding, updating, and even dropping features. Iterate until the product satisfies business and customer needs.
4. Be Simplistic
–Remember that less is much more in the lean approach. Do not complicate it.
-Focus on “just enough” and what is really necessary to satisfy customer needs.
-Appreciate downsizing the product by removing nonessential features, rather than upsizing it with bells and whistles.
-In determining product features, think as if you are decorating a small house. Don’t make your users feel claustrophobic as if they’re in a small, crowded space with a lot of furniture.
5. Don’t Be Afraid of Early Failure
–Remember the famous quotation from American scientist and author Dr. James Jay Horning: “Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.”
-Be adaptive, learn early from failures in initial iterations, and use this experience for later ones.
-Focus on kaizen, which means continuous improvement, at all levels of PDLC by using lessons learned at previous iterations.
- Optimize the Work Flow
–Act “just in time” throughout PDLC. Requirements analysis and design artifacts represent WIP (work in process) inventories in the product development lifecycle. Create them at the right time and with sufficient detail to prevent WIP- level waste.
