Just Develop It!: Managing the Fast-Track New Product Team by Baker Phil

Author:Baker, Phil...
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-05-21T23:49:09.078000+00:00

Leveraging Outside Resources

Leveraging is a powerful tool for accelerating product development. It means doing what you do best and letting others do what they do best. Using outside resources reduces the need for permanent ones. It makes it easier to expand and contract and avoids adding fixed overhead costs. This applies throughout the project, including everything from the way the product is designed to how the product is manufactured, delivered, and sold. It’s the opposite of NIH, “not invented here,” an unfortunate tradition in many companies that insist they can and should do everything themselves.

Fortunately, NIH is now dead in progressive companies. In fact, one of the huge shifts over the last 20 years has been that companies outsource their work to others, even to competitors. Enlightened companies rarely are resistant to work with others if it can help them do something better, faster, or cheaper. Although this may be a more recent phenomenon in the United States and Europe, it’s been going on in Japan for decades and is one of the reasons for the Japanese being so effective at bringing products to market.

A company need not surrender its core competency or “soul” by doing this. Apple uses outside resources to design some of the more complex elements of its computers. For example, some of the mechanical hinges on notebooks that need to work reliably for tens of thousands of cycles are designed by a company that specializes in such mechanisms. While using these resources is often more expensive, it’s easily justified by reducing time to market and by having a reliable design based on the outside company’s years of experience in a specialized area.

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