The PDMA Handbook of New Product Development

12.5. Time-To-Market Traps

As you proceed to accelerate your product development, you should be aware of some traps that await you so that you can respond to them wisely. Here are the main ones.

12.5.1. Scaring or Rewarding People

This area is a minefield. Many managers try to motivate the team with an aggressive time-to-market mandate. Although Swink (2002) shows that an explicit project objective is a critical success factor—and many teams have no project objective—to be effective, the objective must be ambitious while also being seen as achievable and compelling by the team. Compelling means that it is an outside milestone that everyone appreciates as being critical to the business.

Rewards for the team or for individuals can be effective, but just as often they backfire. See Smith and Reinertsen (1998:135-138) for details. Perhaps surprisingly, Swink's research (2003) shows that rewards for speed generally slow down development projects.

12.5.2. Skipping Steps

Many of us were well trained as children that "haste makes waste." From this, we jump to the conclusion that rapid development can be accomplished only by skipping its time-consuming steps, as Crawford (1992) discusses. An effective development process is scalable, so that it can be adjusted to the needs of each project by deleting steps if their total cost outweighs their benefit. But skipping steps arbitrarily without considering their total cost is not the route to effective development, and it will not save time ...