The reason Product Managers hate NPD process

In general, there is an understanding in the industry that NPD processes delay the project. Often you will hear Product Managers blaming the NPD process for delays in product launch.

Product Managers have very high ambitions about product revenue and profitability, and they look up to the NPD process as the biggest hurdle.

Well, I have come across such impatient Product Managers, but on the other side of the coin, we also need to check the effectiveness of processes.

NPD Stage Gate process is primarily designed to run in series. It means, unless one phase is done, you cannot move to the next stage.

The stages of the NPD process will depend on the size of project and organization. However, when working in the capacity of NPD Project Manager, you should have birds eye view and look for inefficient processes.

Here are some ways you can ensure that projects are not delayed due to processes.

Realistic Estimation

Lot of Project Managers try to please the customers hence agree on unrealistic timelines.

When thinking at project level, estimation should include design time, development time, testing validation time and most importantly time to arrange the material.

You should showcase the estimation right after the project kick-off meeting and discuss avenues of optimizing it. This way, all the stakeholders become aware of actual timelines till the product gets ready. Whatever negotiation happens, it happens at this point.

Tailored NPD Process

NPD process for small equipment need not follow NPD process used by NASA for developing spacecraft. Studying existing processes and modifying them to suit your kind of product and industry will help in optimizing the same.

If you can manage project through spreadsheets, why to spend man hours on complicated Smartsheet formats?

Parallel activities

In NPD, everything need not go in series. You should think about activities which can be run in parallel.

Once you start designing, and get a fair idea about system architecture, you can start ordering long lead time material.

You need not wait for design to be ready to finalize third party inspection agencies. Based on initial concept design, you can start interacting with them and initiate contracts and commercial discussions.

Risk planning

It should be an integral part of project management. Anticipating things and planning to mitigate potential risks can greatly save project timelines and cost.

If your product has software which needs to be tested after the unit is ready, you can plan for tabletop testing of software and remove most of the bugs.

For import material, you can raise purchase requests at the beginning of a project.

I think if you take care of these aspects, Product Managers and Customers will be happy.

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