Turn Your Tunnel Into a Funnel
Jodi Soriano, a seasoned healthcare professional, shares her tips to approach product development, leveraging a funnel instead of a tunnel approach.
“This the CEO’s special project.” “We’ve already spent a ton of money.” “If we kill the project now, we will look bad.” “The train is already rolling, and we can’t stop it.” Have you heard these stories before? These are often the rationale as to why a product that clearly needs to be killed….isn’t.
It may be that a key leader loved the product, and no one wants to be the one to kill the sacred cow. Or there may be a sunk cost effect; inertia to continue working on a project because you already invested time, money, and resources. Compounding the issue, many companies develop products using a tunnel instead of a funnel approach. In a tunnel approach to product development, products (even bad ones) that go in the product development pipeline nearly always are launched. A tunnel doesn’t have stage gates where concepts are analyzed and either accelerated or killed, the latter done to make room for the more promising products and services. With each stage of analysis more costly than the last, a tunnel process does not ensure that the company is focused on the most promising concepts.
There is a better way. A funnel approach to product development takes an idea from inception to launch and incorporates pre-development, development, and commercialization activities into one complete, robust process.
Tips to a funnel approach:
● A funnel approach starts with filling the pipeline with the best concepts. These concepts should solve customer needs and follow a process that analyzes each concept and quickly accelerates (go decision) or kills (no go) each concept at stage ‘gates’ before moving onto the next stage. With each stage more costly and time consuming than the last, a funnel approach ensures that your company is focused on the most promising products and services.
● A funnel approach requires strong gatekeeping, clear prioritization, and active communication throughout the organization. This, however, is often hard to implement. It requires a culture shift into a mindset of actively killing projects. It requires strong management and a considerable amount of time to reap the full benefit of the process. And did we mention that changing a company’s culture from a tunnel to a funnel mindset is hard, especially because it involves actively stopping projects? But if done right, the process serves to accelerate speed-to-market, increase new product success rates, decrease new product failures, and increase organizational discipline and focus on the right projects.
Turn your tunnel into a funnel. Improve your product success rate by incorporating a funnel approach to product development. And you will be well on your way to ensuring that your company develops and launches successful, innovative products and services.
Jodi Soriano is currently the Director of New Program Development at the College of American Pathologists (CAP) where she oversees a team that steers concepts from inception to launch through a stage-gate process. She implemented the CAP’s six-stage new product development process, working closely with business units, marketing, sales, IT, and other key stakeholders in order to develop and launch successful products and services for the CAP.
