Is your product development still based on feeling?

Is your product development still based on feeling? I think a lot of companies are really like this. It is often the boss who decides which project to work on with a swipe of his head, or buys a hot product in the market and imitates it and goes on the market. There are also some talented R&D designers who may do it on their own. Of course, this kind of heroic R&D innovation is not necessarily unworkable, and which product may inadvertently become a hit.

However, as a well-organized system, an enterprise not only needs to have sustainable and predictable profit prospects as a whole, but also needs to be predictable and sustainable in each specific function. Product R&D innovation, as the foundation of an enterprise, certainly plays an extremely important fundamental role. To achieve this kind of sustainability and predictability, of course, it is necessary to get rid of the casual state of "following the feeling". So, how can we build structured sustainability capabilities? Is there any advanced experience to learn from?

Of course there are, and the most successful one used by enterprises is the "Integrated Product Development (IPD)" system. Integrated product development first originated from the PACE (Product And Cycle-time Excellence) model of PRTM company in the United States, and was then practiced and operated by IBM, Huawei and other companies, and continuously improved and improved. At present, IPD has become an industry-leading enterprise product development outstanding system with method.

Big Blue IBM re-emerged by relying on the IPD system, and Huawei stepped into the ranks of the world's top 500 through the implementation of the IPD system. Now more and more enterprises in different industries pay attention to and learn from IPD, and learn from it. Drawing on the best practices of leading companies, significant improvements have been made. IPD was born in the world's top 500. After nearly 20 years of development and practice, it has been widely used in communications, electronics, home appliances, machinery, software, chemicals, food, daily chemicals, tobacco and many other industries.

IPD emphasizes market demand as the driving force for product development and manages product development as an investment. IPD integrates many elements of industry best practices, including asynchronous development, common base module (CBB), cross-departmental teams, project and pipeline management, structured processes, customer needs analysis, portfolio optimization, and metrics. .

IPD is an advanced product development concept, and its core ideas are summarized as follows:

1. New product development is an investment decision. IPD emphasizes the need for effective portfolio analysis of product development, and setting checkpoints in the development process, through staged reviews to decide whether the project should continue, pause, terminate or change direction.

Comments: IPD's project approval-development process is trumpet-shaped, and only one of the 10 product project approvals may release the final product. This form seems to make some projects useless, but in fact, it prevents products that do not meet market demand from being developed from the source, which fundamentally reduces waste and costs. According to the experience of mature foreign enterprises, this project elimination mechanism can bring about 40%-60% cost savings! It can be seen that "doing the right thing" is more important than "doing the right thing".

2. Market-based development. IPD emphasizes that product innovation must be based on market demand and competition analysis. To this end, IPD takes the correct definition of product concept and market demand as the first step in the process, and establishes the correct direction from the beginning.

Comments: We all emphasize that product development should be "market-oriented", but how much is actually achieved? It is not called market orientation by imitating the popular products in the market, but to do more work, such as market research, demand analysis, product positioning, internal competitiveness analysis and so on.

3. Collaboration across departments and systems. Using a cross-departmental product development team (PDT: Product Development Team), through effective communication, coordination and decision-making, to achieve the purpose of bringing products to the market as soon as possible.

Comments: Product R&D cannot be a closed-door affair of the R&D department. Now many companies have centralized marketing, R&D, design and other departments to work together. Rapid development for the market.

4. Asynchronous development mode, also known as concurrent engineering. It is through strict planning and accurate interface design that many original follow-up activities are carried out in advance, which can shorten the time to market.

5. Reusability. Adopt Common Building Block (CBB: Common Building Block) to improve the efficiency of product development.

6. Structured process. The relative uncertainty of product development projects requires development processes to strike a balance between unstructured and overly structured.

To successfully implement IPD, according to the experience of mature companies, pay close attention to the following two aspects:

1. Overall planning and step-by-step implementation. IPD involves 7 aspects. If it is fully implemented, it will take a lot of time and cost, but most enterprises do not need to do so. The 7 elements of IPD are interrelated and independent of each other. According to the situation and needs, it should be implemented step by step, combined with the actual research and development capabilities of domestic enterprises, it is recommended to give priority to the implementation of three aspects: structured process, project management, asynchronous development and public basic modules.

2. The implementation of IPD should rely on information tools. The implementation of IPD requires the formulation of a series of processes, systems, methods, and templates. In particular, cross-departmental project teams, hierarchical plan management, and implementation of measurement indicators all require IT-based means to reduce operational difficulty.

All in all, IPD is just a tool. To build a systematic R&D innovation capability, an enterprise not only needs to introduce management tools and IT systems, but also needs to build an open, equal and innovative corporate culture, and cultivate R&D innovation. Only the coaching leadership of managers can truly implement advanced R&D management tools.