Managing and Motivating Technical Professionals in NPDI

Introduction

One of the most complex team-based processes many companies routinely struggle with is developing and launching new products. The new product development and introduction (NPDI) process is especially demanding in terms of knowledge management and commitment from technical professionals (Li & Zhu, 2009). This is particularly true within the field of web application development, where the applications being produced are intended for use throughout entire enterprises.

This paper analyzes the use of team concepts to coordinate the launch of a new web-based, enterprise-wide channel management system — one that gives companies the ability to sell build-to-order products through their websites, their resellers, and their direct sales forces. Called multichannel management, the web-based application competes directly with Salesforce.com and relies on the expertise of web application developers, software testing teams, and integration specialists. Each of these developer teams holds strong opinions about how the system should be integrated, launched, sold, and serviced.

Creating Collaboration in Technical Teams

From the team management principles studied, it became clear that using any form of position-based authority would be far less effective than appealing to technical professionals' opinions, insights, and guidance. In our organization, technical professionals are defined more by technological expertise, acumen, and insight than by seniority. Giving technical professionals the opportunity to attain a high level of ownership over any project — from the simplest coding change to the largest combined effort — is critical to gaining their commitment (Long & Spurlock, 2008).

As part of the team managing the new product introduction, it quickly became apparent that the system was quite complex, offered several potentially strong competitive features relative to its rivals, and was specifically designed to scale across hundreds of simultaneous users. It was, in essence, a true enterprise-class multichannel management system. Typically, marketing managers and directors would take ownership of systems of this type and size prior to launch, defining messaging, competitive differentiation, the unique value proposition, and a comparison of features, functions, and benefits that would drive much of the campaign.

Discussion of how this transition to marketing ownership often created conflicts with software engineers and quality assurance managers led to a key recommendation: for the first time, allow engineers to participate as members of the marketing launch team. Marketing had a tendency to overstate scalability — the number of users the system could support — or to stretch reported functionality in response to competitive pressure. Technology companies including Microsoft (Voss, 1993) and HP, which is renowned for this practice (Jain, 2008), had already demonstrated success in creating shared ownership of product introductions through this strategy.

Integrating Engineers into Marketing Launch Teams

By integrating our development teams with marketing, engineers were able — for the first time — to maintain ownership of the software they had, in some cases, spent years developing, all the way through to the product launch. Allowing them to participate in product launch decisions from a marketing standpoint also revealed an uncomfortable truth: engineering often understood the competitive landscape and its actual functionality better than anyone in marketing. The reason was that engineers had taken great pride in the product features they were responsible for, working to make them the best in the industry, and it was clear that some had invested significant effort in making a statement through their work.

Creating shared ownership of product outcomes strengthens the morale of technical professionals and infuses an entire development team with greater accountability (Voss, 1993) and a greater willingness to internalize a strong commitment to the success of the product (Kochanski & Ledford, 2001).

Conclusion

To prevent this, the Senior Vice President of Marketing and the Senior Vice President of Engineering were designated to arbitrate any strategic changes to messaging. In practice, the organization found that within sixteen weeks of the formal launch date, the application had to be frozen in order to ship on time. Once this parameter was established in the schedule, engineering channeled its energy into delivering exceptional competitive analysis and focused on illustrating the application's strengths — often quantifying its performance relative to competitors and sharing benchmark data collected during the development process.

New product introductions often expose how balkanized companies have become, with engineering demanding exceptional levels of feature specification and applying a high degree of conservatism when defining performance benchmarks such as scalability. By including engineering as part of competitive analysis, new customer scenario planning, and pricing discussions, the organization was able to leverage valuable data that engineers had gathered throughout the development process. Giving technical professionals ownership is an invaluable strategy for achieving high levels of collaboration (Thamhain, 2004).

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