Lean Product Development at PDMA

Two years ago, I heard a presentation on Lean Product Development at the PDMA conference, and it was all about Lean Manufacturing applied to product development. Today, I attended a panel with Michael Kennedy, Dantar Oosterwal of Sara Lee and Dan Shoenhair of Ping, alongside Sandy Munro and Mark Adkins. Dantar has been at the forefront of this work since he began working with Allen Ward when Dantar was with Harley Davidson.

Today, Dr. Ward's vision proved itself to be alive and growing. The only mention of Lean Manufacturing was a brief one, to emphasize that Lean Product Development was not Lean Manufacturing tools applied in product development. With that said, we moved on to more interesting topics, like how Ping increased R & D capacity and Sara Lee increased revenue from new products through their adaptations of the Toyota Product Development System. Sandy Munro provided his unique perspective on how pain creates breakthrough innovations and Mark Adkins shared his experience with moving a group from five phase gates to two, and in the process eliminating a lot of wasteful documentation in exchange for a leaner, faster PD process.

All of the speakers emphasized that the engineers were not a barrier to implementing lean product development - if it was implemented and communicated well. In fact, it had the opposite effect of motivating the engineers and making their jobs more enjoyable - while they got more done than ever before. This panel showed that Lean Product Development is more than just "flavor of the month" - this is one change that produces sustainable results.

How to Avoid a Slow Motion Train Wreck

Yesterday, one of the sponsors of the PDMA event (who shall go unnamed) sponsored a nice dinner for the attendees, and then provided the night's entertainment. By the time the entertainers went on, it was about 7:30 p.m. after a long day of slideshow-driven presentations. Many of the attendees (including myself) had already had at least two drinks. We were definitely in the mood to be entertained.

The sales team put together a series of amusing sketches showing various sorts of dysfunctional behavior in product development, like keeping team knowledge locked inside the senior engineers' heads, and virtual team members who try to work in the dark. These sketches produced lots of laughs and groans of recognition.

Unfortunately, the sketches were surrounded by a lot of obvious sales pitch. The ratio of time was about 3 parts sales pitch to one part fun. The audience responded by talking over the presentation or walking out. I left myself after about 2/3 of the presentation. I doubt many left with a good impression.

I felt a lot of sympathy for the guy running the show. He was probably blinded by the lights and his location would have made it difficult for him to hear the audience's reaction. He may also not have felt empowered to say, "OK. This isn't working. We need to do a redirect here."

What are the unintentional lessons this sponsor delivered on product development at the PDMA conference?

• Don't allow your enthusiasm for an idea to override your customer and market knowledge. Conference dinners are for rekindling old friendships and building new ones. We expect a sponsor to do a little pitching, but by 7 p.m., we've already seen enough slides.


• Establish early customer feedback mechanisms. One quick run-through with an attendee would have shown that this presentation would be perceived as irritating rather than valuable. During the talk itself, the presenter had moments when he could have received feedback from someone watching the audience reaction from backstage.


• Manage risk with contingency plans. Given the setting, poor audience reaction was a major risk. If the presenter had a Plan B, he would have known what to do.


• If things are obviously not working as planned, don't keep charging ahead with your plans! Even without a Plan B, the presenter could have just had a quick word with the skit people during the 2nd or 3rd video, and created a better plan in the moment. I would have given him a lot of credit for adapting on the fly

Google manages this risk with their incremental development process. How do you manage the risk of poor customer reaction in your own product development process?

Iterative Product Development to Enable Breakthroughs: NPD at Google

Today at the Product Development Management Association's Annual Conference, Marissa Mayer described Google's unique use of iterative product development to enable breakthrough products.

She described the difference between Google's approach to innovation, and the traditional "castle-building" approach. Castle-builders close the curtains, go dark for awhile and then release a produce when it is perfect (or nearly so). Google, on the other hand, will often release features very early, then rapidly iterate the product based on user input until it is perfect enough.

As a Web service, Google is uniquely positioned to make the most of this strategy. Ms. Mayer described Google's sophisticated system for tracking usage data to provide hard evidence to answer such questions as "Which user interface is more effective?" that help them identify and fix problems. They can set their servers to redirect only a small number of users to a test site for a new version, and when they want to roll to the next one, it is as simple as rolling code into their production environment, a process they have honed.

One criticism of such an approach is that it leads to only incremental innovation. Ms. Mayer showed how Google uses this to lower the hurdle for riskier, breakthrough products. If something doesn't work, they can just change it or kill it with little risk to the rest of their business. With a little creative thinking, other services companies can directly leverage the central principle to release imperfect products to small numbers of customers early and then perfect them with direct user experience input over time.

This is obviously much harder to do when a product consists of much more than lines of code on a server. However, creative use of rapid prototyping technologies may make it easier for us to get user feedback earlier in the process than we do now, which will make the development and launch processes go more smoothly.

How early do your customers start using your new products? How can you get them to do it earlier - maybe much earlier than you do now?

LPPDE: Dates, Location and Thought Leaders

I am so happy to announce the final dates and location for the 2008 Lean Product and Process Development Exchange!

Location: Denver, CO at the Grand Hyatt.

Dates: April 21 (workshops), April 22 - 23 (main conference)

Thought Leader Panel (besides me):

• Durward K. Sobek, professor at Montana State University and editor of Allen Ward's Lean Product and Process Development.


• Michael Kennedy, author of Product Development for the Lean Enterprise and co-founder of Targeted Convergence, Inc. We will (if all goes well) have a launch party for Michael's 2nd book during the conference!


• Mary Poppendieck, author of Lean Software Development.


• Jamie Flinchbaugh, co-author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to Lean and co-founder of the Lean Learning Center.


• Tricia Sutton, founder of LeanEx, a lean product development peer learning group in Chicago, IL and president of Sutton Enterprises, Inc.


• Ellen Domb, co-author of Simplified TRIZ and Beyond Strategic Vision, and founder of the PQR Group.


• Bo Oppenheim, professor at Loyola Marymount University and member of the Lean Aerospace Initiative.


• Jim Luckman, Lean Enterprise Institute instructor and consultant.

I have also begun to recruit an exciting set of success stories from lean product development pioneers. As I get confirmations, I will post updates on the site.

Our target date for opening registration is October 29, 2007 to coincide with the AME Annual Conference in Chicago that week. Our target base price is $1490 per attendee. With early registration, partner and team discounts, the lowest available target price is $940 per attendee. We will also offer an academic rate for full time students and professors in product development-related fields.

We will launch the official website the same day we launch registration.

I hope to see you in Denver!