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Return to Article: Solid Culture Can Help Avoid Development Hurdles

Evans and Maltz offered their top four tips to overcoming product development barriers.

Evans:

1. Create a culture of innovation and reinforce it.
2. Spend more time on what and not so much on when. (In other words, let the process take its course, and don’t shoehorn it around a marketing deadline.)
3. Prototype early and often. Prototypes produce tangible results and flag potential problems more quickly.
4. Build a team of an appropriate size. If too large, nothing gets accomplished. If too small, expensive changes may have to be made later owing to inadequate early input.

Maltz:

1. Share information widely across the team.
2. Adopt a “fast fail” attitude. That is, early in the development process, identify and kill designs that won’t succeed.
3. Reward good decisions as opposed to good outcomes. A good outcome based on a bad decision could lull a firm into sticking with a bad process.
4. Look at ways for design and development processes to move in parallel, both internally and externally.