The Path to Successful New Products
Published 1/27/2010
Author: Mike Gordon, Chris Musso, Eric Rebentisch, and Nisheeth Gupta
Mike Gordon is a consultant in McKinsey’s New Jersey office; Chris Musso is an associate principal in the Cleveland office; Eric Rebentisch is a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Nisheeth Gupta is a graduate student in the MIT system design and management program.
Summary
The authors found—after surveying more than 300 employees at 28 companies across North America and Europe—that the businesses with the best product-development track records do three things better than their less-successful peers: They create a clear sense of project goals early on, they nurture a strong project culture in their workplace, and they maintain close contact with customers throughout a project’s duration.
The teams in the study that embraced these tactics were 17 times as likely as the laggards to have projects come in on time, five times as likely to be on budget, and twice as likely to meet their company’s return-on-investment targets.
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