When to Launch

In the world of new product development, when to launch is always a tough call. If you are too early, the market may not be ready for your innovation but if you’re too late, the market may have matured to the point where prices are already dropping and so profits could disappear.

This interesting article on the web site of British newspaper, the Telegraph, describes research by two Germans who looked into this. Their conclusion? It’s all about the timing.

Their main finding was that the timing of innovations will generally only be optimised if the entire innovation process, from the initial idea to the market introduction, is oriented around the time factor. The two researchers developed a planning approach based on three methods – priority planning, roadmapping and the real option approach. The methods are not new, but they have become an indispensable means of innovation management for dynamic firms.

The particular value of roadmapping lies in its ability to demonstrate how individual technologies initially build on one another and then supersede each other over time. A good road map will take into account the future development of all technologies that are relevant to the company. The process generally entails close co-operation with suppliers of various different technical components. The researchers concede that predicting future customer needs is anything but easy.

So, integrating your new product development plans with your roadmaps makes sense. Or to put it another way, expressing those plans as roadmaps is one way you can head-off potential problems with the timing of your product launches. I think there are a lot of assumptions in that idea, such as that your roadmaps are complete — they take into account your understanding of the market forces at work, your own technology and product development, plus that of your partners and suppliers. That’s certainly where I see enterprises getting the real “aha” moment out of building the roadmap. It’s only when you put all those ideas together on one shared time line that you can start to make really well informed decisions. In that sense, a good roadmap almost puts itself together.

And as I’ve said before on this site, the process of putting together a good roadmap enables better decision making. If you can build a roadmap of your product plans, including all of the marketing, product and technology data you have at your disposal, you will know when the right time to push the product out into the world is. If you can marry the results of your roadmapping practice with other forms of analysis, including the Real Option approach for getting the financials just right, so much the better.

Note: Image used courtesy of this Flickr user and the CC license. Thanks!

Innovation and Emotions

I came across this interesting post on the role of emotions in product planning on the Consultaglobal blog today. the author writes about how product designers and planners should be factoring people’s emotional connections to the product into their planning.

The most relevant part of the post to this blog’s readers should be this bit:

Amazingly enough, many designers I worked with rarely look at product roadmapping, meaning that they would not spend enough time figuring out how products evolve through successive releases and how that relates to the product’s actual design:

* keeping or dropping features
* improving upon existing features
* enabling features driven by adjacent and unsuspected use cases
* adding new features

As a result, cramming a lot of features into first product releases and mission creep have become well known innovation pitfalls.

I couldn’t agree more, of course. Roadmapping is one small part of the overall planning cycle, but I believe its key for any organization with more than a couple of projects in the works at any one time. That’s especially trued for any company whose products involve a high-tech element. We don’t usually include the emotional context of a product in its plans but I can see where doing so might improve the overall results. I suppose this is just another piece in the puzzle that will soon be commonly understood to define successful product launches.