A Wiser Approach to Product Development for Startups

Which product development concept below do you think will have the greatest impact on your startup’s performance?

• Define the product by having more observation of customer behaviors
• Fast turn-around of product key features
• Create knowledge before spending time and money on prototypes
• Gain agreement from all the stakeholders before implementation
• Learn to pivot from a flawed concept before exhausting your organization’s resources

I ask because?it is wise to start with understanding the biggest problem you currently have and then look for the highest leverage concept for making a change. The next step? Experiment with a countermeasure and measure the improvement. Simple, right? Maybe, maybe not, but this is what it means to take a problem-solving approach to improving your product development process.

Why is this so important? Too often, I see start-up companies work passionately to introduce their unique new product to the marketplace only to find out that they have really missed the mark. See the “Top 10 Startup Failures of 2019,” for example. After all that time, effort, and expense, something had dramatically gone wrong. Naturally, founders go looking for a quick fix.

In “What do Startup Founders Need to Know About the Product Development Process?”, ?the StartUps.com team offers three types of Product Development processes that teams should consider for improving their chances at success: ?

1.???Stage Gate Process

2.???Lean Startup Process

3.???IDEO Process

The article is helpful in that it shares good descriptions of and practices of these three different approaches. I’ve used these concepts in real life product development projects myself. But, if you read it carefully, you’ll notice that all three of these processes are solutions- oriented… something that you should adopt in order to fix your product development process. And what I’ve learned over decades of doing this work (and teaching it) is that there really is a better way. Instead of trying to find a magic fix or to take in all of the concepts of these three processes above, the real work is for you and your team to create your own framework for fast knowledge creation.

This is a much more effective method of addressing failures in your current startup product development process. It will integrate the most important ideas from each of the three approaches above without overburdening your team. Instead of adopting somebody else’s solutions and adding more work for yourself, this is a way to engage your team members in solving the critical problems you have encountered in your own process… every day.

This new, more effective framework for product development includes:

1.???Cross-functional teams that are focused on problem solving.

2.???A truly lean management process that is based on creating first, then executing tasks. It’s all about fast cycles of learning and making real time information available for managing and learning.

3.???Leaders who have learned the skill of developing a cross-functional problem solving culture. The PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Adjust) cycle is the framework for organizational learning. When teams reflect daily, a healthy, generative sense of urgency develops (from the personal commitment from each member) to get the answers your team needs to grow collective knowledge rapidly.

In my new paper, “Rethink Product Development (R&D) and Become More Effective by Changing Your Mindset,” I share my best advice on Lean Product Development process creation based on my experience across many industries, both large and small organizations. I share a new mental model to help you think about how to approach product development. My hope is that this will help you avoid the pitfalls of introducing the wrong products, and at the same time, dramatically cut the cost and long lead times. It is not another list of best practices, another person’s solutions that you should add to your already overburdened team... Instead, it’s a way for you to think, act, and practice building new habits of effective problem solving for you and team members.?It’s about creating new knowledge rather than tracking “tasks to be completed.”

Now, doesn’t that sound more fun, too? I hope you enjoy it, and I hope it's useful to you and your team.

You might look at this list again. Which problem do you need to solve?

• Define the product by having more observation of customer behaviors
• Fast turn-around of product key features
• Create knowledge before spending time and money on prototypes
• Gain agreement from all the stakeholders before implementation
• Learn to pivot from a flawed concept before exhausting your organization’s resources