Fast to Deliver but Slow to Respond
“We have to respond faster to changing consumer demands!”
I’ve heard this at nearly every organization I’ve worked for – both directly and as a consultant. Companies loath to see their competitors launch products that get snapped up by consumers. Staying just ahead of the curve is often the result of changing consumer habits or small advances in technology. And since it may take years to design and release new products, leaders feel compelled to push their product development teams to shorten their launch schedules. But sometimes chasing the metric of shortened schedules can backfire, resulting in products that are quick-to-market but miss the mark.
Reducing Launch Timelines
Builidng a fast and efficient development schedule is important for any team. After all, product design is often an expensive venture. The salaries of employees, the cost of materials, and the equipment needed to test and iterate can all add up. But overhead costs such as office space, software tools, and layers of management make production delays that much more painful. Often engineers fail to appreciate just how much money they can save a company by even slightly improving a development schedule. And for industries that are margin sensitive or for young companies without an existing sales or capitol source, being efficient is paramount.
Compressing development timeliness can be done effectively, and we’ve talked about several strategies in our blog. But teams that are tasked with removing months from their design schedule most often rely heavily the same approach: design reuse. This can be an effective strategy for new and mature companies alike. By upcycling design elements that are known you can remove risk from your testing. Reusing tools and molds means you don’t have to wait weeks or months for them to be built. And avoiding regulatory testing can remove many schedule headaches. But these strategies, while effective at getting to market faster, can reinforce to the problem you tried to fix: you’re not adapting to changing markets. After all, why would re-using the same designs and tools result in a radically different product?
Whats known vs whats needed
The challenge is to find the balance between “whats known” vs “whats needed”. What’s known are the tools and designs you have in your toolbox. They are the skills and backgrounds your team brings. But identifying whats needed needs to come before grabbing whats known.
Whats needed is determined by your customers, and you have to figure this out before you determine what product or features you need to build. Listening well to consumers, understanding trends and their underlying benefits, and predicting new challenges as different technologies come to market is what will help you get or recapture the lead over your competitors. Henry Ford beat his competitors by using the assembly line to produce a car more consumers could afford instead of trying to just compete for a small market. But he quickly found himself falling behind when his competitors realized that consumers wanted more choices that what he was offering.
Sometimes small tweaks really are all that’s needed to respond to emerging consumer trends. People tend to not radically overhaul their lifestyles and surroundings on a recurring bases. So whenever there is an opportunity to provide incremental improvements, there exists and opportunity for a rapid redesign using known designs that are slightly repurposed. These projects often can be executed quickly, provided the core design was done well with ample documentation.
Within your design process, it is also advantageous to allow for as many “tool-safe” decisions as possible to provide maximum flexibility. This allows decisions to be pushed closer to the product release, allowing refinement of features as close to launch as possible. Software-enabled features, replaceable panels, and reserving physical space inside of your product to allow for increased component sizes means that your designs may actually be more responsive to changing consumer demands. These flexible design elements often come with some amount of cost or size increase though, a point that must be understood by management within the company.
But identifying the need must come first, it’s the target for which your new designs are aiming for.
Quick to listen and slow to repeat
When more profound changes in consumer habits emerge, an organization must focus on getting a better understanding of what is the Job To Be Done. Its been said that consumers “buy solutions, not products”. Henry Ford famously said “if I had listened to customers, I would have built a better horse”. Now Ford wasn’t one to ignore consumers, his point was that he focused on the problem his customers needed solving, rather than the product they believed they needed. Anticipating consumer needs starts with the assumption that current solutions don’t do the trick. So why would you re-use them just to get to market faster?
Meeting the changing consumer demands faster involves a few key things:
- Allow time in your development schedule to explore new features and functions, avoiding design re-use if it inhibits creativity
- Define very clearly at the start of a project what you are trying to accomplish. The more vague your definition of success, the less likely you are to achieve it especially on a tight timeline
- Allow time in your development schedule to pivot. Don’t just assume the whole duration of the project that you have the right product, take the time to check it at a few key points along the journey
- Incorporate design flexibility: software defined features, modular hardware, and tool-safe features allow for pivots
Consumers rarely give companies a second chance to wow them, so while time to market is important, its far more critical to get it right rather than get it released. When Microsoft tried to quickly respond to the iPod craze at the turn of the century, their haste to release the Zune did not work out the way they had hoped. Had they taken the time to build a better competitor to iTunes as well, their portable music player would likely have fared better.
When pressing teams to be more responsive to changing market demands, it’s important to remember that an excessive focus on being quick to deliver may mean your organization is slow to respond. Avoiding the design-reuse trap means being willing to take the time to create new feature, products, or technologies. Knowing what to launch is far more critical than how fast, and to do so you must focus on the problems consumers are trying to solve rather than the products they are currently buying.
Put Your Plans in Moetion
If your product development team needs improvement, Moetion Technologies can provide tools and templates, onsite training or workshops, and strategic planning for new technology discovery. We can also facilitate the completion of key documents for teams that have product expertise but are resource-constrained for project management efforts.
Connect today, and we’ll help you put your ideas in Moetion.
Until next time!
Ben Moes
Founder of Moetion Technologies