My Process Toolkit

iNPD – Integrated New Product Development

iNPD

This comes from the work of Kagen and Vogel on developing breakthrough products.  Traditionally new product development involved marketing and engineering throwing documents at each other across a silo chasm in the hope that something valuable would eventually emerge.  
iNDP rejects this, invites design to the table, and integrates all three disciplines into a coherent structure that defines singular and collaborative responsibilities.
Each discipline is responsible for answering one  primary questions.  And each collaborates with another to answer a secondary question.  For example, design leads answering questions of utility, collaborates with engineering on questions of usability, and with marketing on questions of desirability. Profitability is diametrically opposed because as a discipline design does not have the methods or practices necessary to answer profitability questions.

Product Development Process

Activities

Product Development Process - Activities

 

Product Development Process

Goals

Product Development Process - Goals

From a practical perspective, design as a discipline and a set of activities, represents just one of many factors that integrate into a larger and more comprehensive product development process. This grid maps disciplines across the 5 stages of new product development: Define, Discover, Design, Develop, Deploy. Some verticals and some project may require a different mix of disciplines. For example, healthcare should include medical.

 

Prototyping Stack

The Design stage of the new product development process proceeds through 4 layers.  The first, Concept Modelling  identifies the landscape.  The three succeeding each focus on a different question, with each layer building on the prior in progressively greater fidelity, cost and commitment.  The goal is to maximize value and minimize cost by doing as much work as necessary to move forward, but no less.

 

Role Structure

Role Structure

A general organization to structure the different roles and their interrelationships in the context of new product development.  This structure might look different from a product management of HR perspective.  This idea here is to maximize performance through individual disciplinary socialization, while coordinating across specializations for whole team performance.  Everyone knows what they need to do, and how that fits into a large context. There may be individuals that contribute to multiple specializations, this should be minimized because of deep context switching costs.

In this context, Research is purely focused on creating and acquiring new knowledge for its own sake.  Discovery  however is applied research, trying to define a problem space for a design solution.

As this was created in a healthcare context, the Clinical role is critical.  Outside of healthcare this role may be more broadly interpreted to be SMEs, or subject matter expertise.

Evaluation is another form of applied research.  In this case it is applied to design artifacts to ensure they fulfill their promises and that their promises continue to be reasonable.

Marketing, Management and Engineering retain their traditional definitions.

 

Product Vision Canvas

Product Vision Canvas

This canvas helps ensure product design alignment, so that every element can justify its presence in terms of its role in supporting the overall mission.