Product Development

Accelerating the Process and Increasing Success Rates

In today's fast-evolving business environment, product development has become a core competency of many companies, as manufacturers struggle to respond to rapid changes in technology, market dynamics, distribution channels, and end-user needs.

Despite the critical role of product development, many businesses fail to integrate the knowledge of those who best understand market conditions and manufacturing capabilities—as well as the senior executives who direct top-level strategy. Lacking this integration, the performance of new products often falls short because of disconnects between product cost estimates, production processes, and market introduction strategies.

GMT has assisted consumer products and industrial manufacturers in energizing product development by creating an enterprise-wide focus on this capability. GMT has helped clients to redesign process steps, resulting in faster speed to market, lower development and product costs, and higher success rates.

Analyzing Development Processes
Involving Key Stakeholders
Screening Ideas Based on Real-World Data
Speed to Market: Planning for Success
Ensuring Continuous Improvement

Analyzing Development Processes

GMT helps clients to assess the effectiveness of their product development processes by answering essential questions such as:

	Are our development efforts truly market-driven?
	Does our process use resources effectively—and rely on sourcing when appropriate?
	Are product development decisions supported by market facts—or conventional wisdom?
	Can we manage multiple projects, while ensuring successful launches of individual products?
	Do we measure success rates and continuously make process improvements?

Involving Key Stakeholders

While most businesses acknowledge the far-reaching impact of product development, many companies have not established an enterprise-wide emphasis on this capability.

GMT helps clients to create a crossfunctional team composed of representatives from sales, marketing, engineering, purchasing, manufacturing, and finance. This team works to establish an effective product development process—including steps focused on screening ideas, developing cost-effective product specifications and plans, exploring vendor or channel partnerships, and implementing launch strategies.

This team also defines a process to involve senior executives, so that new products reflect top-level strategy—while ensuring that product development is not slowed by unnecessary reviews.

Screening Ideas Based on Real-World Data

In addition to reflecting broad input and strategic priorities, critical product development decisions must be based on data, analysis, and documentation, instead of intuitive assumptions.

Whether product ideas come from customer feedback or a structured innovation process, all should undergo a fact-based screening process, based on such real-world inputs as:

	Market feedback, including data obtained from both customers and end users
	Competitive analysis that shows strengths and weaknesses in products, pricing, and distribution
	Industry assessments, estimating overall growth and share gain potential
	Brand and product line objectives, based on the strategic plan
	Engineering and design obstacles to rapid prototyping and market launch
	Internal cost strategies, including economic objectives and options to achieve them

Speed to Market: Planning for Success

GMT also helps clients to manage the product development pipeline, resulting in more efficient throughput for multiple projects. Whether this means reengineering or eliminating process steps, outsourcing, developing low-cost tooling, or using concurrent steps, the end result is faster market launches and higher returns on investment.

In addition, GMT assists client teams in developing comprehensive launch strategies—including new channel opportunities, promotional programs, sales forecasts, and launch costs and timelines—while products are still in development. For innovative products, GMT has also helped to create a rapid response process that enables the organization to quickly test ideas, cut development costs, and create a marketplace advantage.

Ensuring Continuous Improvement

To support continued success, GMT helps clients to measure and increase product development effectiveness—by scheduling post-launch performance audits that identify improvement opportunities.

Guided by facts about costs, sales, competitive positioning, and marketplace response, these audits measure and improve product development's contribution to both strategic and financial goals.