Pierce the Design Fog Book

Introduction: Empower Teams to Develop Innovative Products

Anyone can use their creativity to design products, and we should! To manufacture high-quality products, we need a skilled team.

Product designers and design engineers in the industry connect ideas to finished products. They combine artistic vision with technical expertise. They figure out how to make products. Their goal is products that are appealing, user-friendly, efficient, and safe.

Designers don’t work alone. Successful new product development requires a design concept that is developed early by a cross-functional team. A cross-functional team includes members from different functional groups within the company. These teams usually involve engineering, design, marketing, sales, and manufacturing.

Teams typically do not communicate well during concept development.

In his book Winning at New Products, Robert G. Cooper writes, “High-quality and effective cross-functional teams are at the heart of any well-executed project.” It’s a key factor that underlies success. In terms of its impact on new product performance, it correlates to profitability and timeliness, in both how fast the project was done and if it launched on time.

Cooper also cites studies that show projects are more than three times as likely to succeed with “sharp, fact-based product definition before development begins.” Projects have 2.5 times the success rate and earn double the market share if the team does “solid up-front homework” doing front-end activities well. These activities include the fuzzy front-end and precede the development phase. This is when the market and product are defined.

However, many teams do not undertake these types of predevelopment activities or perform them to the level they should. Cooper shows that only 16% of person-days on a project is dedicated to early work. He writes, “In too many projects, we observed a new product idea that moved directly into development with very little in the way of up-front homework to define the product and justify the project – a ‘ready, fire, aim’ approach.”

Teams move ahead into product development without customer requirements or customer input. Comparing successful products to failed products, successful ones have about 75% more time dedicated to these pre-development activities.

Little development or knowledge sharing occurs between people on a project, especially in these early phases. This results in information getting lost in translation or simply getting lost, leading to challenges in meeting the customer’s wants or needs.

Misunderstandings happen.

Teams lack clear communication with designers, sometimes assuming shared knowledge. With good intentions, functional groups swap information about a new idea or opportunity they feel is complete. Even if they are done well and are thorough reports, a hand-off introduces the possibility of misinterpretation.

Others cannot easily translate the information into design. Or there are several assumptions that need to be made to jump from idea to design, and assumptions can be wrong. The information from each group is disjointed and may conflict. The designers don’t know what clarifying questions to ask the team.

Designers just accept the information and move on to designing a solution without first developing concepts with their team.

When I ask development team members about their challenges, I hear this frequently: “We started a project with all the market and customer research we were supposed to do. Then, we handed it over to engineers to develop. They came back with something that we didn’t want, and customers don’t like!”

I also talk with engineers, and I can understand their point of view, too. “We were given all this information and had kick off meetings. We understood the problem and actually found a solution! We had to make trade-off decisions and ensure manufacturing could make it. We spent a lot of time coming up with this creative solution, and they didn’t even appreciate it!”

Teamwork can be difficult.

Another reason concept development is difficult is because of challenges with teamwork. Many people believe individual work is superior to teamwork in terms of speed and efficiency—and that more participants lead to wasted time and poorer decisions. As a result, the team leaves designers out of concept sessions. Or designers decide to work alone with what they know.

These decisions can get teams stuck in a loop.

Despite the challenges, cross-functional collaboration has its advantages. We’re pulling together people with diverse mindsets from across the organization to work together on a single idea. While we have different perspectives on the same problem, those perspectives can help us create a better product.

Leadership can help with challenges, like defining goals and aligning performance metrics to those goals. If leadership doesn’t provide that guidance, teams can help themselves by establishing shared objectives: understanding users, their environment, the product’s purpose, and company objectives.

It’s not enough to just share the information. Teams need to explore it together and move ideas toward design inputs they prioritize. Designers must co-work with their cross-functional team before they create solutions. A key aspect of this teamwork is holding space for their team to share their knowledge.