Management and organizational behavior principles

Management and Organizational Behavior

What are the Greatest Impediments to Successful Product Development?

The intent of this essay is to provide insights into the greatest impediments that organizations face in successful new product development. There are many challenges to defining, designing, prototyping and producing products, yet the greatest impediment of all is when an organization becomes too complacent, even lazy, in terms of listening to customers. This lack of the Voice of the Customer is a major reason many organizations go out of business, they quite being relevant to their prospects and customers. Complacency kills companies faster than anything else, because it robs them of their ability to bring new products, new services, and in short, a reason for customers to continually turn to them for solutions.

One of the second major impediments to organizations completing successful product development is a lack of accountability and process definition in engineering, new product development, and product design. This lack of accountability and lack of processes manifest themselves with schedules that are unrealistic, rarely if ever met, and at worst, have all the dates leading to the product launch, yet have a "floating" launch date that never actually gets met. This lack of accountability and process definition makes for endless product design sessions that lead nowhere.