Prototype to Product

Chapter 1. The 11 Deadly Sins of Product Development

Thomas Edison famously said that genius is “1% inspiration, 99% perspiration,” and his observation holds true for product development. Developing “genius-level” (or even mundane) products certainly requires inspiration, but the bulk of the effort is more like perspiration: work that benefits from insight and cleverness but is also largely about not screwing up. Things like ensuring that software doesn’t leak memory and that the right capacitors are used to decouple power supplies. Dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s.

As we noted in the Preface, most product development efforts fail. It’s been my observation that after detailed product design and development begins, failures are not usually due to a lack of inspiration (i.e., poor product ideas) but rather from mistakes made during the “perspiration” part. In other words, most product development failures are good product concepts that fail during the process of turning concept into product.

This chapter is a catalog of the most popular ways to wound or kill product development projects. Most efforts that get derailed do so by stumbling into one or more of a small set of fundamental traps that are easy to fall into—but also fairly avoidable. We’ll briefly review these traps to give an overall feel for the hazards, but not dive into too much detail yet. As you’ll see, much of the rest of this book provides details of strategies and tactics for avoiding them.

Note

A note on organization: ...