Product Development in the Economic Crisis

In the last few months, I have received a number of speaking and writing assignments about how this economic crisis has helped product development.
I'll post the audio from the interviews and the articles that have been published as they are available. In the meantime, I'd like to share with you some ideas that have formed a common thread through all of this work:

• Managing product development through this crisis requires you to manage ALL of your company's product development activities - current product and process support as well as new product development - no matter who does them. You need to get a complete picture of all the activity that's going on so that you can allocate resources appropriately.


• Your best opportunities may lie with strengthening your base. For example, an organization who needs immediate cash flow may benefit from applying engineering resources to make manufacturing process changes that get cost out of the system. We don't normally think of this as product development - or if we do, it's called "current product support" and shuffled off to a distant team or our junior engineers. But it falls squarely into the realm of product development.
  In normal times, this is a good thing - it keeps the new product developers focused on the future. But in these times, you may want to consider applying your most experienced and intelligent minds to the problem of improving current product designs to generate immediate cash.


• Cut projects, not budgets. If you have to reduce expenditures, eliminate items from the portfolio entirely rather than ask teams to deliver across-the-board cuts. Give the programs that are on the list the resources to succeed, and eliminate everything else.
  I'll never forget the time when a blanket travel freeze forced me to cancel a face to face meeting with development partners at a critical time in my program. We conducted the meeting by Web conference instead, but the relationships were not in place for a remote format to work as well as it needed to work. It took literally months to undo the damage from that decision, wasting many times over the cost of the travel by the time we were done.


• Continue your efforts to eliminate waste, especially the big hitters like unproductive meetings and reinvention that suck development resources away when you need them the most.

In a way, we have the advantage in product development over many of our peers: our roles require us to look ahead towards the light at the end of the tunnel. When the recovery begins and your customers want to pull your products from the marketplace, how well will you have prepared your company to respond?