PDMA's Role in Growing Product Development Knowledge

I spent last week at the PDMA International Conference in Orlando, FL.

I just have to say that Disney World is not a good place to have a business meeting where you want people to focus. All the cute kids running around with Mickey Mouse ears and the sight of the Magic Kingdom just over yonder don't contribute to a focused atmosphere. I'm not sure why that is - I've been to business meetings at beach resorts where the beach was a welcome respite rather than a distraction. But in Orlando, I'm always sitting in the meeting rooms wishing that I was riding Space Mountain instead.

Still, I always manage to meet one or two people at PDMA who make the trip worthwhile no matter what the setting or the agenda. This year, it was Mark Adkins of Kennametal. Mark has been involved with PDMA for many years, and he was a Lean Innovation champion for a nonprofit in Ohio in 2004-2006 (if I have my timing correct) before taking a VP position at Kennametal eighteen months ago. Mark and I talked about the efforts PDMA has made to learn more about lean product development.

I think it's naturally hard for some members of PDMA's leadership, especially those who have been around for a long time, to appreciate the value of lean product development. After all, they've seen a lot of trends come and go: cross-functional team, co-location, agile development, Robert Cooper's Stage Gate, etc. Some of these ideas prove their worth and get incorporated into NPD best practices, others fade away.

PDMA sees itself as the guardian of knowledge about how to develop products effectively. Its members have access to the NPD Body of Knowledge, the group publishes the Journal of Product Innovation Management for its academic members, authors "product development 101" books for new PD managers, and certifies New Product Development Practitioners. Given that lean product development has some of these "best practices" directly in its cross-hairs for elimination, it's not surprising that this group has taken awhile to get on board. Still, there have been signs of progress.

April Klimley, the editor of PDMA's Visions magazine for its members, has championed lean authors like Tricia Sutton, Gene Kania and myself. For the last four years, PDMA has had something about lean product development on the agenda for the International Conference - more some years than others, but it has been a consistent presence. Local chapters have put on presentations, or will do so in the coming year. I'm speaking at three chapters myself this year.

This year, Takashi Tanaka of Obeya fame presented as a keynote speaker, and they set aside a space for Tricia Sutton to do a demonstration of Visual Planning. I was there with a Lean Product Development Resource Center, and I gave a half day workshop on lean product development. After my talk with Mark, I would like to make sure that PDMA has a full day workshop and at least two other items on the agenda for next year's conference.

There are a lot of other people working with the lean world to raise lean product development's visibility. Personally, I've decided that I would rather work with PDMA to get these ideas to their membership, while we strengthen the Lean Product and Process Development Exchange to grow and share knowledge within the community.

I would encourage anyone who is committed to growing their ability to develop new products more effectively to check out PDMA, especially any local chapters in their area. The NPDP certification process is worthwhile, too as a way to ensure that you have studied best practices in product development - most of the stuff in the certification review is useful even for lean product development practitioners.

Next year's conference is at Disneyland. I'll just have to sacrifice my weekend to get Space Mountain out of my system BEFORE the conference this year.

How to Avoid a Slow Motion Train Wreck

Yesterday, one of the sponsors of the PDMA event (who shall go unnamed) sponsored a nice dinner for the attendees, and then provided the night's entertainment. By the time the entertainers went on, it was about 7:30 p.m. after a long day of slideshow-driven presentations. Many of the attendees (including myself) had already had at least two drinks. We were definitely in the mood to be entertained.

The sales team put together a series of amusing sketches showing various sorts of dysfunctional behavior in product development, like keeping team knowledge locked inside the senior engineers' heads, and virtual team members who try to work in the dark. These sketches produced lots of laughs and groans of recognition.

Unfortunately, the sketches were surrounded by a lot of obvious sales pitch. The ratio of time was about 3 parts sales pitch to one part fun. The audience responded by talking over the presentation or walking out. I left myself after about 2/3 of the presentation. I doubt many left with a good impression.

I felt a lot of sympathy for the guy running the show. He was probably blinded by the lights and his location would have made it difficult for him to hear the audience's reaction. He may also not have felt empowered to say, "OK. This isn't working. We need to do a redirect here."

What are the unintentional lessons this sponsor delivered on product development at the PDMA conference?

• Don't allow your enthusiasm for an idea to override your customer and market knowledge. Conference dinners are for rekindling old friendships and building new ones. We expect a sponsor to do a little pitching, but by 7 p.m., we've already seen enough slides.


• Establish early customer feedback mechanisms. One quick run-through with an attendee would have shown that this presentation would be perceived as irritating rather than valuable. During the talk itself, the presenter had moments when he could have received feedback from someone watching the audience reaction from backstage.


• Manage risk with contingency plans. Given the setting, poor audience reaction was a major risk. If the presenter had a Plan B, he would have known what to do.


• If things are obviously not working as planned, don't keep charging ahead with your plans! Even without a Plan B, the presenter could have just had a quick word with the skit people during the 2nd or 3rd video, and created a better plan in the moment. I would have given him a lot of credit for adapting on the fly

Google manages this risk with their incremental development process. How do you manage the risk of poor customer reaction in your own product development process?

PDMA Visions Article: What is Lean about Product Development?

I have a new article out in PDMA Visions, the member magazine for the Product Development Management Association. This article surveys the landscape of lean product development. I co-authored the article with Tricia Sutton, who will also co-chair the Lean Product and Process Development Conference with me for next year.

The article includes a chart comparing different approaches to product development, including their proponents. The concept for this has its origins in my 2005 Road Trip, where I interviewed people across America and summarized my findings in the Lean Product Development Road Trip Report.

As you can imagine, Tricia and I had some long and hard discussions about whom to include in the right hand column, when it came time to name names. Not every prominent name is on the list and I'm sure I will have to field some disagreement from a few of the ones who are. Not that I mind. I'll use any excuse to have a discussion that may deepen my understanding.

What do you think about the different schools within lean product development? Which ones have you drawn from in your own lean journey?

Blogging for PDMA

I have joined the blogging team for the Product Development Management Association! Here is their blog: PDMA Blog. I will write original posts for them, and I will cross-post every third or fourth post from this blog - particularly the ones that are more focused on product development than lean.

Other bloggers on the site post on NPD best practices, innovation and creativty, product strategy and execution. Most of us are involved in our local PDMA chapters in some way, so there are posts about local chapter activities and live-blogging of the PDMA national conference from a variety of perspectives.

I would encourage you to check out PDMA, especially if there is a local chapter in your area. It is a great way to connect with other product developers.

Oregon PDMA/PMF Conference Part 3: Space is Always Open

In the afternoon, the conference had an Open Space session where the attendees "design their own conference." Diana Larsen of Futureworks Consulting got us going with a description of the process and the ground rules, while we sat in one giant circle.

People nominated themselves to be session hosts, simply by writing a topic on a piece of paper, choosing one of two times and a location then posting it on the "Marketplace" bulletin board. Then we chose the topics we most wanted to discuss. "Butterflies" chose to work by themselves rather than join groups, but Diana claimed that butterflies would tend to cluster and I did see that happen. "Bumblebees" buzzed from session to session, pollinating one session with ideas from another.

For the first time, I participated in a lively discussion on "Cultural Change for Collaboration" where we talked about the importance of getting senior leaders to behave collaboratively themselves to foster collaboration in the rest of the organization. To do that, we need to make sure that people understand the relationships between collaboration and decision-making, which can take many forms.

I was a bit of a bumblebee in the second session, drifting between topics like Cultural Issues in Global Collaboration, How to Get Anti-social Engineers to Collaborate, and Collaborating with the "Man on the Mountain." This final topic was an interesting lesson in collaboration, because the people drawn to it talked for at least twenty minutes before I observed that we all had a different picture of the "Man on the Mountain" - who he was and why he was up there.

I"ve organized conferences and I'm a bit of a control freak so I wasn't sure how Open Space would work. But the topics were interesting, the session hosts and participants brought their passion into the room and the discussions were interesting and fruitful - much more so than an endless series of passive slideshows.

Oregon PDMA/PMF Conference Part 2: You Think You Have Customers?

In the morning, I attended a break-out session on Collaboration in Innovation by Bryan Jobes of Boeing's Commercial Airplanes Division. He was a senior manager for the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

Here's the thing that struck me: commercial aircraft designers have to balance trade-offs for a range of customers and end users from passengers, pilots, flight attendants, ground crew, airport infrastructure managers, passenger experience managers (or whatever they call those people who decide that those in Coach don't need much legroom), capacity managers, bean counters, etc. plus a worldwide network of regulatory agencies. That they can do this and deliver an innovative aircraft in a reasonable (for the industry) timeframe seems like quite an accomplishment.

Collaboration is a given in this environment, and he provided a nice example of how Marketing, Product and Technology roadmaps work together to provide direction for a team making literally thousands of trade-off decisions.

Oregon PDMA/PMF Conference Part 1: Best Slideshow Ever

I'm at the Oregon Product Development Management Association and Program Management Forum joint conference today.

The keynote speaker was Sam Lawrence of Jive Software, speaking on Collaboration 2.0. He had a great but not very deep message about how today, it's all about Web 2.0 - it's all about collaboration, people, openness, participation. As a keynote presentation, it was perfect - broad in scope and entertaining in tone. While he didn't offer any new insights, he did set up the deep dives in the break-out sessions very well.

I was most impressed with his use of presentation software (PowerPoint® is the most popular but I'm not certain that was the one he used). Most people use these things to present bullet list after bullet list, perhaps punctuated with a complex diagram. He used it completely differently. Most of his slides consisted of one word or phrase with an accompanying image, delivered alongside a rapidfire monologue. The slides provided a bit of an ironic twist to his words sometimes - think Steven Colbert's The Word. Most often, they punctuated his main points like exclamation marks.

I still have the usual problem with slidesets - I cannot remember much of their content. But with this presentation style and the purpose of his talk, that did not matter quite so much.