Moving from Risks to Opportunities: A Process to Manage New Product Transitions

摘要

As a consequence of faster time-to-market and shorter product life cycles, companies today introduce new products more frequently. While new products can potentially bring tremendous value, they also pose enormous challenges as companies are most vulnerable during new product transitions. Due to the high stakes of new product transitions, planning and execution cannot be overemphasized. Nevertheless, our discussions with product transition teams suggested that a recurring handicap during transitions was the lack of a formal process to guide managerial decisions. This work develops a process to facilitate decision making during new product transitions. The proposed process analyzes the risks impacting a transition, identifies a set of factors across departments tracking those risks, monitors the evolution of these factors over time, and develops a playbook mapping scenarios of risks and responses. Our studies show that the transition process helps level expectations across the organization, lessens the chance and impact of unanticipated outcomes, and helps synchronize responses among different departments.