Michael Keer, Founder and CEO of the Product Realization Group, recently shared his expertise on New Product Introduction (NPI) best practices, particularly with regard to successfully bringing a hardware product to market.
Michael defines NPI as the people, processes, technology and tools that provide a formal methodology for a product to go from engineering into volume production.
What makes for a strong NPI?
Any product entering the consumer market needs to enter the market fast. The longer it takes for a product to enter the market, the more product revenue you miss, the greater your operating costs, and the greater the opportunity for a competitor’s entry into the market.
The NPI process has many risks that bedevil bringing a new product to market. For starters, unrealistic timeframes for development, confusing regulations, testing and manufacturing pose a huge risk, particularly for start-ups with finite cash availability. In addition, many companies make the mistake of constantly making last minute changes to the “final” product. Michael believes it’s okay to ship a first generation product that’s “good enough” (ie minimal viable product); continual changes in the pursuit of an evanescent perfection can be lethal for a start-up. Being able to understand when your product is truly customer-ready is a key factor for success.
Michael recommended a few NPI best practices that hardware-based entrepreneurs can follow.
- Use concurrent engineering — doing as much engineering in parallel as possible — As with all development tasks, the success of a concurrent engineering effort is predicated on getting the right players involved.
- Assign an experienced product manager — this is important because they have a clear understanding of what needs to happen to go from prototype to volume production. They will define the NPI schedule including deliverables, task linkages, due dates, and owners.
- Build a cross-functional team — it’s crucially important to including marketing, operations, engineering, finance, and (lest we forget) service — Involving a strong, cross-functional team early is the necessary foundation for development and scaling of a successful product.
Limiting New-Product Risk
Bringing new products to market also requires mitigating the attendant and inevitable new-product risks. Michael is a staunch proponent of identifying your risk areas as early in the NPI process as possible. Potential risks can encompass anything from technical challenges, to cost, to supply chain, to distribution channels, and regulatory issues. So take the time to identify your risk areas, and always take time to explicitly understand the impact of these in your product development decisions. Michael’s advice for risk avoidance in NPI is fairly simple: focus on basic product requirements / features, and follow an agile / iterative development process, where knowledge is gained, and risks are identified and eliminated along the way.
Michael ended by sharing three success tips for bringing a new product to market.
- Truly understand your minimum viable product (MVP), and have a relentless focus on bringing just this to market
- Clearly define and adhere to your NPI schedule — Track every decision, set due dates and owners, understand linkage, and set hard deliverables. This “plan the work, work the plan” approach will help you navigate the course on the crazy and frenetic path to getting a new product to market!
- Learn from feasibility, prototype and pilot builds — Costs for mistakes escalate rapidly from feasibility to prototype to full production. Do it right the first time — the leverage is huge!
Cost Escalator Effect
