Improving The Product Development Processes
to Manage Development Risk
(Free White Paper)

To create new products, firms employ a product development process (PDP) to generate new product concepts, to translate the best of these concepts into quality products, and to manage the risks inherent in bringing such new products to the market. A well-designed PDP is necessary to reduce development time, create better products, increase market share, and generate profit.

This paper investigates the relationship between product development risk and PDP management and seeks to help companies improve their processes. We begin by discussing product development risks and describing a spectrum of different PDPs. We compare the traditional, rigid, staged PDP with the alternative, flexible, spiral PDP and other variants. We then propose several iteration- and review-based metrics by which PDPs can be effectively identified and
compared.

Data from ten company case studies exemplify a wide variety of actual PDPs, demonstrate the utility of iteration and review metrics in distinguishing PDPs, and illustrate how different processes manage different risks.