What Speed-to-Market Disadvantages Should Be Avoided?
pgermeraad
Step 1c of Improving Your Speed-to-Market Is:
Determining what disadvantages to avoid?
Determining the balance between Speed-to-Market and other business objectives.
You need to be aware of what might go wrong from an emphasis on managing time-to-market or improving Speed-to-Market, higher costs, decreased product quality, or incrementalism, for example.
Balancing Speed-to-Market and other objectives is necessary to mitigate or avoid these potential disadvantages:
A decreased product life-cycle which may decrease potential sales revenue
Increased costs, particularly for first-movers
Incrementalism – favoring incremental new products over more novel innovation
A decrease in product quality, either from mistakes being made in development or from launching a product before it is truly ready.
Recognize that a tacit assumption of many is that STM and product quality are opposing attributes of a development process. STM may be improved (shortened) by skipping steps of the development process, thus compromising product quality. For those who use highly structured development processes such as Phase–gate model or Six Sigma, product development is often viewed as a clearly defined sequence of steps to be followed. Skipping a step—due to perceived time pressure, for example—may not only undercut quality but can ultimately lengthen STM if the organization must complete or repeat the step later. Following this view, STM is usually improved by following all of the prescribed steps and putting priority into improving those steps that have the largest impact on STM (i.e. via a Pareto analysis)
Almost all these disadvantages are caused by a narrow focus on Speed-to-Market.
Efficiency and effectiveness are both critical.
Your emphasis should be on improving your overall product development capability rather than having a narrow focus on Speed-to-Market.
