This section presents a scenario that includes typical challenges faced by a small company during product development and launch.

Scenario 3: An Improved Version of an Existing Product

Company profile: This company has made a slight profit for each of the last five years and has 50 employees. There are two other significant competitors that share a market that is less than 1000 total units per year. Because of expectations in the industry, the next product must have at least 20 percent better performance and cost 20 percent less than the current product. There are separate teams for hardware development and software development. The market is not growing. There is a small, dedicated sales force and either factory representatives or distributors install the products. The two application specialists create approximately three technical publications per year to showcase the product because they are typically dealing with urgent situations around the globe. The product manager is a former sales person and his most common complaint is that there are not enough sales and applications resources to serve his product line.

How can this company deliver an innovative product? What improvements should be incorporated into the development process? What new strategies should be in the marketing plan and the launch plan? What can be done to increase the effectiveness of the existing sales and application resources?

To improve early sales and market share, a product launch solution developed and delivered by OpLaunch might include the following tasks:

• Improve the efficiency of development organization by creating a core product development and launch team that has hardware and software members in addition to representatives from other functional areas. Develop and deliver the appropriate internal development and launch training. Evaluate and implement appropriate tools.
• Ensure that the executive team provides the appropriate support to the cross-functional development team
• After gathering input from factory, field, and customer representatives, refine the next product's feature set to comply with the desired introduction date
• Develop a system to improve the identification of the daily/weekly critical path issues and communicate development and launch priorities to the entire organization
• Engage the appropriate external resources to ensure that upcoming worldwide product compliance issues are addressed
• Implement "force multiplier" tactics to improve the communication productivity of the product manager and applications specialists. Provide special training on the production of webcasts and seminars.
• Revise the sales, service, and customer support systems to use just-in-time training, online demonstrations, online reference material, and topical webcasts.
• Assist the R&D and marketing managers as they develop processes and documents related to product development and launch
• Orchestrate efforts with external partners such as public relations, advertising, and documentation representatives to achieve maximum synergy for the product
• Develop a system to facilitate the publication of customer applications and success stories that does not require additional significant work from the applications specialists.
• Design and implement the introduction plans for the first few trade shows
• Transition the company culture from an academic culture to an agile, business culture
• Design and implement a launch management system