New Product Development Coaching

OpLaunch shapes new product development success through coaching using a deliberate practice approach which has much in common with the Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) approach. Often, the focus of deliberate practice is the improvement of individual skills. Synergistic new product development requires deliberate practice that impacts network performance.

A new product development (NPD) coach trains one individual or a small group of contributors to improve individual and network performance.

OpLaunch strives to improve performance to produce more value from the perspective of the customer.

Helping individual contributors become better at their craft in an NPD environment

Assuming that you are proficient in your specific disciplines (such as science, engineering, programming, marketing, business, or communication), how can you become a more valuable individual contributor in a NPD environment?

Improvements in effectiveness, efficiency, and/or productivity are desirable target conditions. These can be improved by focussing efforts on:

• Aligning your efforts to value from the perspective of the customer.
• Recognizing unvalidated inputs. Analyzing unvalidated inputs.
• Minifying delays due to disciplinary sequencing (delays caused when one group waits for information computed by another group)
• Minifying distractions
• Increasing agility
• Achieving and maintaining flow (when skill level matches the challenge)
• Discerning when it is prudent to pursue individual, concentrated effort over group effort

Improvements in these areas ensure that you will be able to evolve higher level items such as the the development process and the culture of the organization.

Helping your network become great

What makes a new product development network great? One of my favorite quotes about great teams is:

"If you give a good idea to a mediocre team they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a great team they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works." Ed Catmull, Pixar

I prefer to use the term 'network' instead of 'team.' The term network suggests a diversity of contributors. For a given project, not all contributors work for one organization. Some have full-time commitments to a primary project while others split their time among many projects. Some contribute throughout the project while others are involved for a short time. Some are masters of their craft while others are perpetual amateurs.

A great team strives to understand how immediate efforts influence for desirable outcomes valued by customer at launch. Coaching is designed to shift paradigms within the network. This includes valuing:

• Launch-driven strategy over handoffs from functional group to functional group
• Set-based design (examining the solution space) over point-based design.
• Disintermediation of information over information asymmetry
• Planning and execution over planning or execution
• Elegant team situation models over aggregated solutions
• System view over segmented view

Getting individual contributor inputs considered in the executive suite

Our coaching prepares individual contributors to be more effective when they interact with representatives from the executive suite and other managers. This coaching is devoted to improving the inputs of individual contributors in these areas:

• How to contrast common sources of information (such as industry reports and forecasts) with well-crafted experiments done by individual contributors. This includes learning derived from experiments with product prototypes throughout development.
• How to increase the credibility of information using multi-disciplinary techniques
• How to present results in the appropriate 'language' to have the maximum impact on decisions related to project constraints, product features, and portfolio considerations.

Contact OpLaunch to shape your new product development success through coaching

To inquire about specific ways to improve your new product or service development results through coaching, I invite you to begin a dialog by visiting our Start an NPD Discussion page.