How do you ensure timely and quality delivery of your Product R&D lifecycle?

Before embarking on any Product R&D initiative, it's crucial to pinpoint and accurately describe the problem you're aiming to solve. This precise description will aid in identifying target users and their specific needs, thereby effectively outlining the product's key features and benefits. Moreover, a clear success and impact metric should be established and aligned with business strategy and customer requirements.

I totally agree with this process. In our company, we have introduced the IBM IPDM process, which stands for Integrated Product Development. We don't just view product development as the creation of a product; we treat it as a business endeavor. This means we always prioritize market demand and customer requirements. After all, every product should generate revenue. Once we ensure there's a demand, we can address questions about our target audience, the key product features, and the benefits it offers. Additionally, by considering market demand, we can avoid over-designing.

Key steps as per me: 1) Market Research: To identify the problem at hand, market around it and a know how of what the competition. 2) Defining the value proposition: Clear answer to “How your product will solve the above problem” and “Why it is better than competitors”. 3) Setting your product vision and goals: A description of the “Desired Future State of the Product” and “Product Impact” and “Measurement of Product Impact”. 4) Prioritization of product features: Decision on the most important and urgent requirements of your customers and the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that can be delivered. 5) Product Roadmap: Creation of outline of the product features delivery over time, and the dependencies and risks involved there.

Across our portfolio of projects we have defined a set of completion tracking metrics. We track 25 elements and determine how well formed a project is at various stages of development. We aggregate this up into various views using Power BI and use a Metrics tracking dashboard to monitor and target percentage completion performance across time.

In addition to scope and objectives, it's also important to appropriately define sponsorship, roles and responsibilities within the project organization. Especially in product development projects, there is the risk of overlap between product manager and project manager roles. Defining a clear governance at the beginning can significantly streamline project execution, decision making and conflict resolution. Sponsorship it's another key aspect to define upfront. Having a strong and present sponsor, who is really interested in the value that the project will bring, it's fundamental to keep the project running.

We use a modified PMP Gate based Framework across hardware, modules, mini/lite, software, and integration projects. Projects are ideated, structured, run, and monitored with 4 core systems. Data from these systems are brought into a Power Bi dataset for standardized and Ad-hoc analysis.

Selecting a structured framework, such as the Lean Startup or Design Thinking, not only provides a foundation for the R&D process but also allows for incorporating and adapting practices that resonate with the organizational culture. The chosen framework must complement and amplify the product's nature, market, and team capabilities.

Specific framework are very effective and efficient to manage similar projects with same kind of phases, deliverable and schedule structure. Gate based process with go/no-go decision points are very effective in product development projects. It becomes challenging and not always effective to apply this kind of framework for projects that are totally new for the organization.

We use Trello board to track Asana kanban which aggregates Jira tasks into Monday milestones which we define through Notion. It works great. But really we just do whatever the team is willing to do in order to talk with each other

Our Portfolio is run as a Federated Global Portfolio of projects. We have 4 R&D groups the have portfolio and project execution managers responsible for constituent project development. Portfolio mangers also work with Business Unit management and marketing throughout the ideation and development process to make sure we are delivering on expectations and priorities. We use a custom project management systems, SharePoint, and Power Bi solutions to Communication and collaboration the health and performance of the portfolio. Tertiary parties, such as operations and service have more limited access to portfolio data and reporting.

Open and continuous communication ensures that vision, goals, and assumptions are effectively shared with the team, guaranteeing unified efforts. By collaborating closely with customers and stakeholders, companies can better adapt their practices and products to genuine market needs, creating genuinely valuable solutions.

Communication and collaboration are surely key for the project success. Having a clear communication plan at the beginning of the project could improve significantly the effectiveness. In product development projects it's often hard to have an unique communication style and approach for all the functions involved. Product development involves both business and technical organizations and communication should be tailored in this sense. Involvement of all the management levels impacted by the project it's challenging but key. Constant, predictable and clear communication to keep all layers informed and committed it's fundamental to keep the pace of the project and minimize the risks related to a lack of stakeholder engagement.

The heart of product R&D lies within the iterative experimentation cycle. Rapid prototyping allows companies to test product hypotheses in real time, gathering valuable data and feedback. Iteration based on learning allows constant product refinement, relentlessly pursuing the perfect product-market fit.

From a Portfolio Management perspective, we are constantly making changes to our core data capture systems and report analysis solutions. It too about 2 years to get traction and standup our data reporting environment. At that point it became clear that we could ask more of our integrated dataset that included scope, time, and finance information. The next step is to integrate more resource/allocation related data.

Within the iteration process the working team needs to know that failing it's an acceptable option and that they will not be blamed for this. Risk of failure has to be taken into consideration and possible mitigations have to be planned in advance. Failing is a fundamental step for know-how creation and it's important to be valued within the R&D community.

In order to do effective evaluation and optimization you need historic data. We have made rudimentary attempts at doing this type of analysis but have had the challenge of limited consistent historic data structure overtime. There is also a cultural data maturity component, the organizations has not yet seen the value of investing in this type of data resource as a strategic opportunity. Aggregate core source systems data into a Lakehouse Architecture.

Once the product is launched, it's essential to measure its performance and assess how it aligns with customer expectations and needs. Through meticulous evaluation, companies can pinpoint areas of strength and weakness, proactively optimizing the product to enhance its value and market competitiveness.

Effective evaluation needs clear and pre-defined evaluations criteria, which will need to be agreed in advance, during the initial phases of the project. Evaluation has to be linked to the benefit the product/service will deliver. Optimization is fundamental to trigger a virtuous circle of launching products and keep improving them, increasing their value on the market. Product retrospectives are very effective in this sense.

The system is built to win - if you deliver, the pressure to deliver more and quicker will only grow. Same if you don’t. You need to build teams which are aware of this and prepare for growing pressure. Be it by building or adopting new tools, optimizing development processes or hiring new people. A sense of storm on the horizon makes sure the team is not caught off guard

Focus on the problem not the solution. Sometimes, the initial solution is not the best one, and I always found it helpful to dedicate a small amount of time and ressources in developing quick and dirty proof of concepts for specific cases. It's a way to mitigate risks and better understand the problem as well as seeing it from a different perspective. Even if it's never used, it's always an opportunity to learn and, who knows, it might even get used for a completely unrelated project! I think it's important to master your development cycle, having all the right tools, and having ways to make and test things quickly enables more of these proof of concepts to be created, strengthening this cycle in return with more special use cases.