Time-to-Market for Innovations

There is one measure of time-to-market that is critical for any product development organization: time-to-market for innovations. That is, how long does it take for a truly innovative feature that directly impacts customer value to become part of a product that a customer can buy?

Some of the things that we do in product development to speed time-to-market (platform-based development, standardized work for development and testing, partner co-development) can actually hurt this metric, by making it much harder for new technologies to make their way into the product stream.

There are three different ways to manage this risk:

• Develop advanced technologies off the schedule for new product development, and incorporate them into new products as they mature. This mitigates the risk that an innovative feature will need to be removed from a product late in the game to maintain schedule or simply because it's not ready for prime time.
  
• Provide a "waiver" process to selectively exempt products from platform requirements, so that platform-based products will have a little breathing room to incorporate innovations without putting the entire product family at risk.
  
• Use standardized work appropriately - which means that the people doing the work create the standards, continuously seek ways to improve them and recognize the situations where the standards make no sense. In those cases, provide a means for disregarding the standard if the team can create a strong business case for doing so.