The guiding principle behind the "Lean Product Development Process" is the following:

Be Customer Oriented!

To meet the needs of your clients and offer them products that contains what they value most it's necessary to embrace this principle and make it real within your company culture.

This principle might seem trivial and simplistic, but many businesses that are doing what they have always done will never become market leaders because they lack this principle in their culture.

For the best "product develoment process", the company that paved the way and continues to do it today, is TOYOTA.

The Principles utilized by Toyota are listed here below:

Principles for the Product Development Process:

  1. Establish what the customer frame as: VALUE.
  2. In the beginning of the process explore the range of the most innovative availables solutions.
  3. Establish the "takt time" of the product development process.
  4. Develop: standardization, modularity, and common components.

Principles for the building of a Team dedicated to the product development.

  1. The responsibility of product development has to be assigned to a single leader.
  2. Balance functional and cross-functional skills.
  3. Develop technical skills through specific training plans.
  4. Include suppliers in the product development process.
  5. Be able to continuously learn and improve.
  6. Create a culture based on well-defined principles and values.

Principles related to the Methods and the Technologies

  1. Adapt product development technologies to the people and the process not the other way around.
  2. Align the product development organization, using simple means of visual communication.
  3. Develop standardization at all levels.

At a first glance the process seems complex, but its value outweighs the complexity, especially when it can made the success or the failure of your company.

Mario Mason