Product Development Fundamentals

This note introduces key managerial issues in new product development. It describes the product development funnel and alternative approaches to structuring product development teams including functional, lightweight, heavyweight, and autonomous/dedicated teams, which vary in their capacity to manage integration. More formal product development approaches including the stage-gate process and critical-path method are described, as are agile methods and principles-and related tools such as scrum, extreme programming, feature-driven development. Product development metrics including lead time, capacity, and productivity are defined and discussed.