Exploratory Product Development: Executive Version
Exploratory Product Development: Executive Version
Adaptable Product Development in a Changing World
About the Book
This Executive Version of Exploratory PD® (ExPD) examines the organizational constraints imposed by a standard phased-and-gated product development process. We discuss why those constraints are a problem for organizations today. We then look at the lessons of the Manhattan Project, a highly successful historical project, and introduce ExPD an adaptable and flexible product development approach to developing products.
ExPD proposes a new approach to developing products, using a two-pronged solution: (1) treating product development from a comprehensive systems perspective, and (2) fundamentally redesigning the development process based on reducing project uncertainties and risk.
ExPD differs from the traditional phased and gated process in its fundamental redesign of the development process to reduce uncertainties and risks. It is an adaptive approach that responds quickly to internal and external factors. This process helps project teams identify, evaluate, and prioritize uncertainties and risks throughout a project. It then helps the team determine how and when to resolve the uncertainty or when it is appropriate to kill a project.
So often, product development fails to deliver on expectations. Why is it so hard to get product development right? The underlying problem is uncertainty, which creates risk and the potential for loss. As developers, we try to read the market correctly, but even if we are right today, how do we know the market will remain stable while we’re developing the product? Maybe the competition will render our product obsolete, or the technology won’t work the way we expect, or future regulatory changes might make our product more expensive to produce.
In product development, the underlying problem is uncertainty, which creates risk and the potential for loss.
This uncertainty, coupled with the complexity of the environment, means that product development teams are often making decisions in the absence of sufficient information. Making decisions in the absence of sufficient information is one of the biggest challenges we see in product development. For example, you may have a good understanding of the customer and competition but relatively little understanding of the technology to use. Alternatively, you might see potential use for an existing technology but not know very much about the market. Whenever there is a lot of uncertainty with a project, there’s the risk of making errors that are costly—not just in money or time, but in lost opportunities.
Early on, we tried implementing phased-and-gated processes, the traditional best-practice product development system. Companies saw improvements, but still, we heard common complaints from our clients: burdensome documentation, a slow pace, and creativity-killing rigidity.
For us, the straw that broke the camel’s back came in the form of a very dissatisfied R&D director at a Fortune 500 company where we assisted in the design and implementation of a phased-and-gated process. While the director accepted that the approach would provide helpful structure, he was particularly resistant to its adoption, because it would be too slow and insufficiently adaptable to the ebbs and flows of his business.
But if the industry-standard best practice—the phased-and-gated approach—wasn’t the best methodology for his company, what was? At the time, there were no good alternatives. That’s when we went to work in earnest on the development of our own approach. We knew product development could be improved, and now we have the answer: ExPD.
Please read this Executive Version of Exploratory PD; we welcome your feedback as we finish our soon to be released book. Visit our website at www.exploratorypd.com
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- The Standard Innovation Approach
- Innovation Constraints
- Lessons of the Past
-
The Solution: Exploratory PD (ExPD)
- Segment 1: Strategy Segment
- Segment 2: Ideas & Selection
- Segment 3: Explore & Create Segment
- Special Considerations for Implementing ExPD
- ExPD Case Study: OdorDone
- ExPD Is a System
- Summary
- Notes
The Leanpub 60-day 100% Happiness Guarantee
Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.
See full terms
Do Well. Do Good.
Authors have earned$11,826,004writing, publishing and selling on Leanpub, earning 80% royalties while saving up to 25 million pounds of CO2 and up to 46,000 trees.
Learn more about writing on Leanpub
Free Updates. DRM Free.
If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).
Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers) and EPUB (for phones, tablets and Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.
Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.
Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them
Top Books
Stratospheric
Tom Hombergs, Björn Wilmsmann, and Philip RiecksFrom Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS. All you need to know to get a Spring Boot application into production with AWS. No previous AWS knowledge required.
Go to stratospheric.dev for a tour of the contents.
node-opcua by example
Etienne RossignonGet the best out of node-opcua through a set of documented examples by the author himself that will allow you to create stunning OPCUA Servers or Clients.
C++20 - The Complete Guide
Nicolai M. JosuttisAll new language and library features of C++20 (for those who know previous C++ versions).
The book presents all new language and library features of C++20. Learn how this impacts day-to-day programming, to benefit in practice, to combine new features, and to avoid all new traps.
Buy early, pay less, free updates.
Other books:
Discrete Mathematics for Computer Science
Alexander Shen, Alexander S. Kulikov, Vladimir Podolskii, and Alexander GolovnevThis book supplements the DM for CS Specialization at Coursera and contains many interactive puzzles, autograded quizzes, and code snippets. They are intended to help you to discover important ideas in discrete mathematics on your own. By purchasing the book, you will get all updates of the book free of charge when they are released.
Maîtriser Apache JMeter
Philippe Mouawad, Bruno Demion (Milamber), and Antonio Gomes RodriguesToute la puissance d'Apache JMeter expliquée par ses commiteurs et utilisateurs experts. De l'intégration continue en passant par le Cloud, vous découvrirez comment intégrer JMeter à vos processus "Agile" et Devops.
If you're looking for the newer english version of this book, go to Master JMeter : From load testing to DevOps
OpenIntro Statistics
David Diez, Christopher Barr, Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel, and OpenIntroA complete foundation for Statistics, also serving as a foundation for Data Science.
Leanpub revenue supports OpenIntro (US-based nonprofit) so we can provide free desk copies to teachers interested in using OpenIntro Statistics in the classroom and expand the project to support free textbooks in other subjects.
More resources: openintro.org.
R Programming for Data Science
Roger D. PengThis book brings the fundamentals of R programming to you, using the same material developed as part of the industry-leading Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization. The skills taught in this book will lay the foundation for you to begin your journey learning data science. Printed copies of this book are available through Lulu.
Aprendiendo Git
Miguel Angel Durán GarcíaGit no es complicado... ¡Si lo entiendes! 😜
¿Sientes que sabes usarlo porque has memorizado todos los comandos que necesitas? ¡Pero no entiendes qué hace cada cosa y por qué! Así es normal que, cuando exista un problema, te cueste resolverlo.
¡Con este libro vas a entender de una vez por todas todo lo que es Git y cómo sacarle provecho!
Introduction to Data Science
Rafael A IrizarryThe demand for skilled data science practitioners in industry, academia, and government is rapidly growing. This book introduces concepts from probability, statistical inference, linear regression and machine learning and R programming skills. Throughout the book we demonstrate how these can help you tackle real-world data analysis challenges.
Ansible for DevOps
Jeff GeerlingAnsible is a simple, but powerful, server and configuration management tool. Learn to use Ansible effectively, whether you manage one server—or thousands.
Top Bundles
- #1
CCIE Service Provider Ultimate Study Bundle
2 Books
Piotr Jablonski, Lukasz Bromirski, and Nick Russo have joined forces to deliver the only CCIE Service Provider training resource you'll ever need. This bundle contains a detailed and challenging collection of workbook labs, plus an extensively detailed technical reference guide. All of us have earned the CCIE Service Provider certification... - #2
All the Books of The Medical Futurist
6 Books
We put together the most popular books from The Medical Futurist to provide a clear picture about the major trends shaping the future of medicine and healthcare. Digital health technologies, artificial intelligence, the future of 20 medical specialties, big pharma, data privacy, digital health investments and how technology giants such as Amazon... - #3
Practical FP in Scala + Functional event-driven architecture
2 Books
Practical FP in Scala (A hands-on approach) & Functional event-driven architecture, aka FEDA, (Powered by Scala 3), together as a bundle! The content of PFP in Scala is a requirement to understand FEDA so why not take advantage of this bundle!? - #4
Pattern-Oriented Memory Forensics and Malware Detection
2 Books
This training bundle for security engineers and researchers, malware and memory forensics analysts includes two accelerated training courses for Windows memory dump analysis using WinDbg. It is also useful for technical support and escalation engineers who analyze memory dumps from complex software environments and need to check for possible... - #5
Software Architecture
2 Books
"Software Architecture for Developers" is a practical and pragmatic guide to modern, lightweight software architecture, specifically aimed at developers. You'll learn:The essence of software architecture.Why the software architecture role should include coding, coaching and collaboration.The things that you really need to think about before... - #10
Learn Git, Bash, and Terraform the Hard Way
3 Books
Learn Git, Bash and Terraform using the Hard Way method.These technologies are essential tools in the DevOps armoury. These books walk you through their features and subtleties in a simple, gradual way that reinforces learning rather than baffling you with theory.