What is the most important factor in improving product development?
As realtors are fond of saying about buying houses, there are three important factors to consider in improving how you develop new products: people, people, and people. But how quickly we forget this and put our energy instead into processes, approaches, and tools. Chapter 6 (page 126) of Flexible Product Development has a chart showing that people are about ten times more important than processes (see this chart). One reason that people are paramount is that experienced, motivated people tend to fix anything else that gets in their way, such as a process bottleneck or an organizational reporting problem. People includes connections between people, that is, teams. You can do plenty to improve teams, but in fact, we have mostly moved backwards on teams over the past couple of decades. One area we have weakened is in failing to dedicate a person to one project. Dedication provides a host of benefits, one of which is accountability (if you are assigned to multiple projects, you can always
