The 3/27/06 issue of Business Week
cover story asks, Is Your Company Fast Enough? Our first
reaction was "Great!" but after reading it we were disappointed that
most of the examples reflected proven but well-worn strategies. Many of
the newest approaches were overlooked.
Consider
the following:
Agility and
Speed are essential: Speed
in a straight line is increasingly less fruitful than speed combined with
agility. The path to new products
is fraught with corrections. Trends
change, initial suppliers fail to live up to volume expectations, etc.
Changing direction, making correction quickly and adjusting is as
important as accelerating.
Definition and
customer testing are now bigger barriers than development and manufacturing:
Over the past ten years, most companies have sped up their product
development and manufacturing processes such that the greatest barriers to
speed have shifted from execution to identifying new opportunities and getting
fast feedback from potential customers. The good
news is that web based technologies combined with rapid prototyping
enable companies to quickly share, test and create two-way feedback between
new product ideas and potential customers.
Customer experience
design is a new and faster route to good definition, design and testing:
More features and benefits do not necessarily lead to superior customer
experience. Rather than
exclusively focusing on product features and benefits, incorporate
"design for experience" methods and training.
For example, BMW’s
“iDrive” technology has been roundly received as a technology in search of
a purpose.
Let the market decide:
Rather than trying to divine what the perfect product or service
definition is, learn how to conduct smaller market and technology tests such
that actual users pick your path. Firms
such as IDEO strongly advocate rapid prototypes because analytically making
such choices is fraught with error. Learn
how to confine introductory risk instead of taking too long to get it perfect.
Remember,
reducing
time-to-market is far more dependent on cultural change than it is
technology. Take a moment to look at our Point of View (POV) and
other resources on this site to learn more about how to intelligently
reduce time-to-market.
We
help firms build a culture of speed --- finding where it offers the greatest
value -- and showing them how to incorporate it into everyone's actions.
Through consulting and educational workshops,
our work is based on deep experience in high tech, automotive,
pharmaceuticals, consumer products, and financial services.
We
teach these principles to executives including a public seminar at the California
Institute of Technology and over a hundred companies privately. If
you're interested, please contact us: cm@fastcycle.com
We
welcome your interest,
Christopher
Meyer
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