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Team Culture and Hybrid NPD Processes

Culture is one of those words that we all know what it means, yet we struggle to identify and name it.  Team and organizational cultures are best characterized from those within the group.  They might describe the culture as open and risk-tolerant or as hierarchical and lacking trust. 

New product development (NPD) is a systematic approach to convert nascent ideas into salable products and services.  Not every idea makes it to the marketplace nor should they.  We develop new products by taking advantage of new technologies and by combining concepts into new opportunities.  NDP is a fun arena in which to work because product managers can apply business knowledge, technical skills, and market research to drive success.

A Typical Hybrid NPD Process

Most product development professionals are familiar with waterfall or staged-and-gated process.  These approaches to NPD include upfront customer research and product design followed sequentially by prototype testing and manufacturing scale-up.  Thus, the term “waterfall” as each phase flows to the next with appropriate management approvals and team hand-offs.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are Agile processes that support project management of (primarily) software product development.  Scrum is the most widely deployed Agile methodology and uses short periods of collaborative teamwork to accomplish small tasks.  Flexibility is valued above planning, yet full Agile practices are difficult to successfully implement for NPD.

Hybrid NPD processes include WAGILE (read more here) and Lean NPD (read more here).  These processes embrace the discipline of setting boundaries (e.g., gates or management reviews) while simultaneously supporting frequent experimentation and direct customer feedback.  Integrating the structure of waterfall approaches with the desire for continuous learning of Agile systems, hybrid NPD offers key benefits to product development such as improved speed-to-market and increased customer satisfaction.

Teamwork in a Hybrid Environment

Product development teams have their own culture, just as any group has its own culture.  For hybrid NPD processes, teams must actively collaborate to achieve a shared purpose.  This starts with trust.  In The Innovation ANSWER Book, we discuss the theory of intellectual trust and emotional trust.  Taking the necessary, calculated risks for NPD success requires teams built on emotional trust.  Let me give an illustration from the feline world.

Along with a number of our neighbors, we feed a handful of stray cats.  We’ve named them based on their looks and coloring, so we have “Ginger” and “Gray”, for instance.  Most of the strays give us only intellectual trust.  They wander by each person’s door, checking to see if food has been set out.  Yet, they are easily spooked if we walk too close to them or attempt to pet them.  They intellectually trust us to deliver food but are unwilling to take further risks.

However, a couple of the strays have built adequate emotional trust with the humans.  They meow at us and allow people to get close.  One neighbor has invited one in to watch television with her, have a snack, and then be on his way.  She has a cute collection of photos of the white cat.  Another of the strays was sitting outside my door one day with a beat-up cat I’d never seen before.  She trusted us to feed and help him back to good health. 

Team Trust and Hybrid NPD

Do your NPD teams have a culture of trust?    Are our teams willing to take risks or do they scatter like stray cats when the going gets tough?

Successful implementation of quicker and more effective hybrid NPD processes requires a high degree of emotional trust.  Management must trust their teams (within well-defined boundaries) to execute the development work in the best way they know how.  Team leaders must trust the process to balance risk of investment and speed.  Individual contributors trust their own excellence and commitment to growing a culture of disciplined, yet flexible, product development tools.

Learn More

Please contact me at [email protected] to learn more about hybrid NPD project team effectiveness.  

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Project Management Skills

In the past few weeks, we have been exploring the similarities and differences in roles between project managers and product managers.

To wrap up this series, we describe specific skills to master for each role.  In this post, we will discuss project management skills and next week, will take a look at those necessary for success as a product manager.

Strategic Project Management Skills

Project managers must view the outcomes of their work from a strategic perspective what is the goal of the project?  How does this particular project advance objectives of the firm?  Why is it project important now?

Businesses undertake projects for just three basic reasons.

  1. Improve revenue (growth)
  2. Reduce costs (savings)
  3. Stay in business (competition, regulatory)

Project managers with a strategic viewpoint will reinforce growth, cost reduction, or regulatory compliance in their work.  It is important to understand why you’re doing a project before developing detailed plans.

Tactical Project Management Skills

All business strategies are converted into tactical plans and operational activities.  Tactics describe how an activity, or task will be done, how it will be completed, and when the product or feature will be released.

Project managers are experts at tactical skills, such as creating and managing project schedules, monitoring actual cost versus budgets, and mitigating project risks.  In fact, much of the role of a project manager in new product development is to monitor and manage risk.  This is the purpose of any staged-and-gated process or the WAGILE approach to develop new products with speed and agility.

Projects often require significant capital investment and resource commitments.  Senior executives do not make these decisions lightly.  So, a large part of the project manager’s job is to reassure senior executives at their decisions were appropriate.  (Of course, it is also important to inform them if the project is completely off the rails and was a poor decision.)

For example, if a product roadmap indicates a next generation product release by year-end, the project manager will develop a schedule with appropriate resourcing with the following tasks.

  • Proof of concept (2 months)
  • Customer feedback (1 month)
  • Generate product specs (1 month)
  • Design and produce prototype (2 months)
  • Customer feedback (1 month)
  • Finalize product specs (1 month)
  • Initiate manufacturing (1 month)
  • Quality check and ramp up production (1 month)

Operational Project Management Skills

As indicated earlier in this series, project managers are often responsible for much of the day-to-day execution of a project.  This means that project managers need strong technical skills to help team members in trouble-shooting and mitigating risks that can impact schedules or budgets.  Project managers are also responsible for reporting project status from project initiation to close-out.

Thus, project managers need to master communication, negotiation, and leadership.  While all successful new product development team members should be good at communication, negotiation, and leadership, project managers utilize these skills up and down organizational strata as well as peer-to-peer.  For instance, knowing what level of detail to communicate to whom can drive a successful dialogue and help project managers enable decisions.

Project Management Skills

Successful project managers demonstrate mastery in many skills.  Join us on 11 April at noon CDT (1 pm EDT) for an open discussion session of project vs. product management.  Learn more here and REGISTER HERE.

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Product Manager and Project Manager Roles

Societies mature and in a competitive free market, job specialization results from those advances.  Long ago, a family raised its own food and used the by-products for other uses (e.g., cattle delivered beef to eat, leather for shoes, and fat to make soap and candles).  Today we have farmers and ranchers raising meat and produce that we purchase at the supermarket, and we buy our shoes at different stores depending on special needs (e.g., running shoes at a sporting goods store and dress shoes at department stores).

Specialization also trickles into our job functions.  Previously, project managers juggled strategic and tactical objectives, balancing business needs with the day-to-day implementation of project tasks.  Moreover, the project manager was also typically responsible for people and talent management, including development and learning plans for project team members. 

Project managers, like the family of bygone days, also managed multiple tasks – negotiations for contracts (with help from purchasing and legal), quality planning, and risk management.  In this way, project managers “owned” the project and understood benefits as well as costs.  A highly skilled and experienced project manager zooms in and out from a macro-viewpoint to detailed tasks and activity implementations as needed throughout any given workday.

Recent Introduction of Product Management

In the last several years, a new role has surfaced in many businesses.  That is the role of a product manager.  Conceptually, a product manager handles a project’s strategic linkages between the business or customer needs and the technical development and design teams.  Ideally, the project manager then can focus solely on execution of day-to-day tasks.

With continued job specialization, product management is sometimes further classified by in-bound and out-bound product marketing.  To gather customer and business needs, product managers must analyze consumer behaviors, market trends, competitors, and so on.  But product managers also work as brand or category managers, helping to determine product features and release roadmaps.  The former represents in-bound marketing and the latter out-bound product management.  In both cases, product managers remain attuned to customer needs above all else.

The Need for Product Management

How do you know if your organization needs a product manager?  One organization with which I have worked recently had conducted R&D activities, product development, and customer interactions through individuals called “project managers”.  As their business has evolved, they were purchasing and re-branding many different product solutions from outside vendors.  The role of project manager changed to product manager.

In this situation, individuals originally spent the bulk of their day-to-day activity monitoring budgets and tasks to convert a new idea into a saleable product.  They Interacted closely with their manufacturing facility to ensure quality and proper inventory levels.  They established schedules and supervised technicians and specialists who gathered experimental data to continually improve product designs.  Small teams often visited the factory (located in the same building as the project team) in order to ensure product development progressed at the right pace.

As the company transitioned to more off-the-shelf and out-of-the-box product solutions, the role of the project manager was not as crucial as that of a product manager.  No longer were the factory development trials critical path items.  Instead, they assessed quality by gathering samples from the outside vendors.  Because the firm’s product cycle follows the school year, timetables and schedules for off-the-shelf products are set without negotiation.  Coordination activities adjusted from day-to-day to year-long sales cycles.

Product managers learned forecasting and sales techniques to balance the technical expertise they had previously established as project managers.  In this way, the product managers truly served both the business and their customer.

What is Your Role?

Learning to distinguish between the roles of project management and product management is important for today’s complex business challenges.  Learn more at our free webinar on Project vs. Product Management 11 April at 1 pm EDT/12 pm CDT.  Register here for our monthly product development lunch and learn.

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What is Innovation?

Click on the image to watch a short summary video, then read on!

Innovation is one of the most over-used buzzwords of today.  I wrote about this previously in 2013!  (Read Introduction to Disruptive Innovation here.)  Yet, innovation – as a word – continues to be bandied about as a solution to all problems but also as a mysterious, perhaps magical, process.  In this post, I hope to break down the word “innovation” to a set of practical and actionable steps that help businesses accomplish growth without all the hype.

New Way of Doing Something

Innovation encompasses a new way of successfully doing something.  Note the specific use of the word “success”.  If we try a new way to do something and it fails, we are learning but we have not innovated.  Failing is part of the innovation process, yet it is not the end goal of innovation.

Process innovation often involves new ways of doing something.  In manufacturing, we might be able to skip a step by combining forming and assembly or by using pre-printed packaging.  These actions are usually considered “cost-saving”, but when we involve a new way of executing the action, it is clearly defined as a process innovation.

We also see product innovations and perhaps these are the more common goal of corporate innovation programs.  New product development (NPD) is a subset of innovation in which we design and develop new product innovations.  Again, the new product is helping consumers and end-users “do something in a new way,” but is focused on tangible features and product attributes. 

In recent times, product innovations have begun to incorporate the changes and additions in software code.  Almost all tangible products also include software in some capacity.  Coding introduces changes in how a product (hardware or software) functions, and thus, can be innovative.  However, we must be very careful to not confuse bug fixes as “innovative”.  End-users don’t want mistakes in the product in the first place, so a bug fix is not adding value.

Social and Political Innovations

Some innovations cause us to do something in a new way because society expects it or because government regulations restrict the old way of doing something.  As an example, the US Government restricted the sale of incandescent light bulbs a few years ago.  Consumers were certainly not clamoring for a new way to light their homes, especially since incandescent light bulbs are cheaper than alternatives.  Yet a change in government policy forced to change in behavior; this defines a “political innovation”.  Such innovations may not add value to either the consumer or producer but are necessary for the business to sustain itself.

Adoption of New Technology

Many process and product innovations result from the adoption of new technology.  Advances in technology allow producers to manufacture goods in more cost-effective ways and to add features to products.  Technology allows processes to become more efficient, so that manufacturers can make products with fewer quality defects and at increased rates.  Technology has served to stimulate innovation significantly.

For instance, computer-controlled manufacturing processes allow assembly lines to move at a quicker pace.  Technology, such as lasers and cameras, can evaluate quality of products during manufacturing without the cost of destructive testing.  Increased resource utilization by managing the supply chain and distribution with technical innovations also result in cost-savings shared between consumers and manufacturers.

Application of New Knowledge

Finally, innovation involves the application of knowledge to new situations as well as the growth of knowledge.  When we apply a solution from one domain to another, by transferring knowledge, the result is innovation.

One of my favorite examples of innovation from new knowledge is Velcro.  Legend has it that the inventor studied lizards and other critters that creep and crawl in vertical surfaces.  Transferring knowledge of how their little feet are able to “stick” to these surfaces allowed him to conceive a new way to attach two items together.  What knowledge are you holding that contained a product or process?

Defining Innovation

Innovation is a new way of doing something by application of technology or knowledge to improve a process or product in such a way that it adds value for both the end-user and the producer.  Innovation is a new way of doing something but that “something” doesn’t have to be radical or unique.  Transferring our knowledge and experience between and among industries often leads to a new way of doing something.

Do you want to learn an effective process for design of innovation?  Join me, starting on 1 December, for the by-request Creativity Master Class.  Register here.

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Lessons for a Young Innovator

Recently I was the keynote speaker for the Chemical Engineering Graduate Student Symposium at University of Washington (go huskies!).  I am so honored that my alumni university asked me to share my career journey with smart and ambitious students.  Of course, I wondered “What on earth can I talk about?” since my usual presentations are more technical and geared toward product, project, and engineering managers

So, I decided to present what I wish I could have told my younger self knowing what I know today.  I also realized that my own career has had (so far) three periods of time that roughly correlate with what I wish I had known earlier.  I’ll share these three items with you and I hope that you can apply these to your creative endeavors. 

Be Expectant

licensed via 123rf.com

Being expectant means to be ready for surprises.  It means everything will not stay as it is today.  In my early career, I thought every job was stable and routines would not change.  Of course this was a naïve view of jobs and careers.

Product innovation managers also must be expectant.  Fads, trends, markets, and technologies change constantly.  Effective new product development (NPD) requires expecting changes.  Successful NPD means you plan for changes in advance and can introduce product solutions that solve customer problems when they occur.  Expectancy means planning to deliver value for your customers and your firm regardless of market turmoil. 

Be Open

In my mid-career, I was completely taken off-guard by corporate politics.  I had no idea that peak engineering and managerial performance mattered little to folks centered on personal ego and greed.  A hard lesson, but it taught me to be open to new possibilities and to think broadly about alternatives. 

As product innovation professionals, we always need open minds.  I love Carol Dweck’s book on mindsets – she teaches us that if we think we can, we can.  The concepts of fixed and growth mindsets help us to recognize barriers and opportunities.

This positive and open mindset helps us recognize true problems facing customers.  We can then develop the best set of features and attributes through co-creation.  It is not enough to put a band-aid on a product and hope for the best.  Nor is it our job as innovators to simply add features whether or not our paying customers need or want these functions.  Being open to all possibilities makes us more creative and better problem solvers. 

Be Bold

In a master mind group on Design Thinking a few years ago, I asked participants to select values that meant the most to them personally and for their work life.  I commented that I wasn’t even sure what “bold” as a value meant.  A friend and very smart colleague in ITs said, “You are bold.  You just did a triathlon.”  Okay, I’m a nerd, and the triathlon was a big goal for me, stretching me to uncomfortable physical limits (literally).  And in Full disclosure, it was a sprint triathlon – a baby step for true athletes. 

As product innovation professionals, we must be bold.  We must take calculated risks in the design and development of new products and services.  We have to ask tough questions of our customers, suppliers, and partners.  And to be bold, we must be expectant and open. 

Be Expectant, Be Open, Be Bold

As a chemical engineer, I agree that society categorizes me as a nerd.  I certainly do have some nerdy habits and traits.  But engineers are also excellent at trouble-shooting and problem-solving.  We are creative in that sense.  We can build the solutions needed for successful product innovation. 

How can you be expectant, open, and bold?  I encourage you to amp up your creativity, to tap into new possibilities, view the world from new perspectives, and to try new things on a journey of a lifelong learning.  Your first step is to join me in the Special Creativity Workshop on Friday, 1 October 2021 from 10 am to 12 pm CDT.  Register here. 

Also be sure to stop by and say “hi” at my booth!  Global NP Solutions is sponsoring the PDMA Annual Conference in Baltimore on 13-16 November.

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Hybrid Work – Two Views

As people go back to the office (or continue to work from home), we are faced with challenges for innovation.  A lot of businesses have spent the past 18 months in survival mode – just trying to keep the doors open, regardless of the cost.  Many companies had workforce reductions, cut benefits, and did more with less.  Now, labor is rapidly becoming available but is expensive and some local regulations continue to stifle growth. 

Regardless of the situation that a firm faces from a labor and productivity perspective, leaders cannot ignore necessary innovation.  After such a long period of cost-cutting and tight budgets, the winners will be those organizations that creatively adapt to a hybrid workplace while generating novel products and services for their customers. 

license from creative commons

What is Hybrid Work?

As we wrote about in Bridging Communication Gaps in Virtual Teams (Leveraging Constraints for Innovation, 2018), dispersed teams involve one or more people at different locations.  Hybrid work may include one-to-many or many-to-many arrangements.  This means every individual is working in a remote office, or some people are in the office together while others are working by themselves in remote locations. 

The benefit of hybrid work to product innovation is that new product development (NPD) can address both local and global needs.  Effective product design and development from dispersed teams follows the Virtual Team Model with five elements and 16 practices. 

Work Tasks

Project teams work on two types of tasks:  transactional and relational.  A transactional task can be completed by an individual with little input from others.  Communication to finish the activity is asynchronous.  Transactional tasks include data gathering, analysis and summary.  Calculations and many experiments are transactional in nature. 

Most innovation work activities involving quantitative evaluation are transactional.  For example, analyzing the data from a customer survey uses statistics, can be conducted by a lone team member, and is quantitative in nature.  Remote team members can easily complete transactional project activities. 

On the other hand, strategic questions and new product design parameters are relational work tasks.  These activities require dialogue, shared experiences, and creative approaches to problem-solving.  Relational tasks are best accomplished in an interactive environment. 

For example, determining if the organization will expand the product line to a new market involves a great deal of discussion to ensure the move will align with the organization’s strategy.  Information – including quantitative data – must be discussed, debated, and evaluated in a live (synchronous) environment. 

Relational work is best performed in a face-to-face environment.  However, it is possible – with a trained facilitator – to achieve desired outcomes of relational work with a hybrid work team. 

Creativity in Hybrid Teams

First, teams must have established “emotional” trust.  As discussed by Rosenfeld, et al. emotional trust is necessary from team members to take risks.  Any innovation work is risky because the outcomes are uncertain.  Emotional trust is built through longer working relationships so that each team member knows that others will meet their expectations. 

Next, hybrid teams can be creative in relational and strategic planning for NPD.  Again, a good facilitator can support a hybrid team to generate creative ideas through guided exercises.  A favorite ideation activity is “brainwriting” using an online whiteboard.  (For more information, see this post.)  These creative endeavors are most successful with both individual and collaborative elements. 

Finally, hybrid teams can prepare for innovation work with good planning.  Using limited synchronous meetings for relation-building and creative work is beneficial.  Save the one-way management communications of schedule and budget for newsletters and email.  Both are great for transactional information sharing among dispersed team members.  You want to preserve your limited time together for creative endeavors that require deep relationships. 

Building a Creative Hybrid Team

You will need to assess which work tasks are transactional and which are relational on your project.  Early NPD work needs the creative vibe of synchronous and relational dialogue.  Get your team together in one place to diagnose customer problems, align strategic goals, and generate ideas. 

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Later stages of experimentation and design of a new product or service can be accomplished with dispersed and remote teams.  Make sure the expertise of your team members includes individual leadership skills.  Task-oriented leaders use one-way communication for project status reporting and reserve live meetings for creative discussion. 

Learn More

Join my upcoming presentations at AIChE on 3 September 2021, Texas ACMP Annual Conference on 17 September 2021, and ASQ Innovation Day on 15 October 2021.  You can also register for our very affordable (and FUN) creativity workshop on 1 October.  You will learn and practice generating new ideas in a remote, live, facilitated 2-hour workshop.  Contact me at [email protected] for details.  Register here.

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What is WAGILE?

WAGILE is an emerging approach to product innovation.  You might ask, “Why do we need yet another, new approach to managing product development?”  The answer is that every system has advantages and that over time, we can recognize process improvements.  A secondary answer is more data-based.  Studies indicate that revamping and revitalizing your new product development (NPD) process can not only enhance participation but yield improved results, such as creative solutions, time-to-market, and profitability.

Traditional NPD Processes

Organizations implement NPD processes to manage risk.  Risk in innovation is more loosely defined than in traditional project management.  Innovation professionals encounter risk from two perspectives:  understanding the product or project requirements and developing the required technology.  These are identified as “requirements uncertainty” and “technical uncertainty” in the figure.

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A traditional NPD process, such as the staged-and-gated process, is designed primarily to manage investment risk.  Each stage of work involves more resources but as the project advances through the various stages, technical risks are addressed.  Each subsequent stage of work encounters less uncertainty.  In this way, financial risk is minimized because there is little investment for small-scale experiments during initial stages and as more knowledge is gained, the investments will grow but with reduced uncertainty in the outcomes.  Sometimes these processes are called “waterfall” since each step flows to the next; however, there is no easy way to go “backward” in the system.

To counter the bureaucracy that many large companies incorporate alongside traditional NPD processes, the Agile methodology intentionally leaves the overall requirements uncertain.  Theoretically, the customer provides feedback after each incremental development step (called a “sprint”) so that the requirements uncertainty is reduced.  A drawback of Agile is that real customers are often not included in the process.  Further, it is difficult to determine when a project is “done” in terms of meeting market requirements.

What is WAGILE?

WAGILE is a hybrid process that blends the best of the traditional waterfall systems with Agile philosophy (“W” + “Agile”).  The rigor of a staged-and-gated project management approach is coupled with required customer feedback in each phase.  Incremental and iterative work within a stage allows innovation teams to adequately address design and development needs.  Yet repeating a phase of work is done only when necessary.  The WAGILE philosophy incorporates key ideas from these innovation approaches.

  • Move fast
  • Practice discipline
  • Understand risks
  • Engage customers
  • Provide autonomy

You can read more about the WAGILE Philosophy here.

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WAGILE Roles

Roles and responsibilities are defined clearly for Agile processes, such as Scrum, as well as in traditional project management.  Many of these roles are similar to those utilized in WAGILE.  Some key roles and responsibilities for WAGILE are described below.  You can read more about the WAGILE Roles here.

  • Project Leader:  Somewhat like a traditional brand manager, the Project Leader in WAGILE is responsible for the overall product life cycle and drives product innovation.
  • Customer Representative:  In Scrum, the product owner represents the voice of the customer.  In WAGILE, the Customer Representative carries out this responsibility and helps to translate or articulate customer needs for the innovation team.
  • Team Leader:  In many ways, the team leader in WAGILE is similar to a traditional project manager with tactical and operational responsibility for the execution of the project.  Team leaders are servant leaders yet maintain autonomy for project decisions within the scope of the project.
  • Cross-Functional Team:  Like all new product development teams, successful innovation under a WAGILE approach requires participation from all relevant departments and functions.  Team members are generalist-specialists, as in an Agile approach and the core team maintains continuity throughout the project effort.

Some WAGILE Tools

WAGILE tools are based primarily on Design Thinking to incorporate customer feedback at each stage of development.  Each individual WAGILE project will use several complementary tools to complete the work of a given phase.  Depending on the scale, scope, and breadth of the innovation work, several tools are used at multiple points during development.  A fundamental decision point in selecting feedback techniques is to use the data gathering, testing, and experimentation tools that provide the highest density of customer information.  Read more about WAGILE Tools here – a list of some of my favorite tools follows.

  • Customer empathy map
  • Customer journey map
  • Affinity diagrams
  • Product Portfolio Management
  • Scrum board
  • Business model canvas
  • Paper prototypes

Benefits of WAGILE

Again, you might be asking, “Why do I need a new system to manage product development?”  Often the NPD process becomes stale and the links to customer feedback become broken.  You need WAGILE if you find your innovation teams bogged down in idea generation stages or if recent product launches are met with “ho-hum” market responses.  The biggest benefit of WAGILE is that it is a flexible, risk-based process to get new products into competitive markets.  We measure success of product innovation in WAGILE via market success:  customer satisfaction, market share, and profitability.

What’s Next? 

If you’d like to learn more about WAGILE, please join our WAGILE class on 18 and 19 February.  We will dig deeper into each of these concepts.  Your homework during the course allows you to begin transitioning to a more flexible and adaptable approach to innovation within the governance of a risk-adjusted process.  For personalized problem-solving or customized training, contact me at [email protected] for innovation consulting.   

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About Me

I am inspired by writing, teaching, and coaching.  I tackle life with an infusion of rigor, zeal, and faith.   It brings me joy to help you build innovation leaders.  Teresa Jurgens-Kowal is an experienced innovation professional with a passion for lifelong learning with a PhD in Chemical Engineering and an MBA in Computer and Information Decision Making.  My credentials include PE (State of Louisiana), NPDP, PMP®, and CPEM, and I am a DiSC® certified facilitator.  Contact me at [email protected] or area code 281 + phone 787-3979 for more information on coaching for entrepreneurs and innovators.

Unless otherwise indicated, images used under Creative Commons.

Wagile Leadership

I became interested in leadership when I was first appointed to a supervisory position.  My first exposure to leading a team was negative – from my perspective – but my management saw a different view.  I thought that being a manager meant I was not smart enough to continue on the technical ladder.  Little did I know that most technical answers are easy compared to motivating a team toward a common goal. 

Innovation leadership takes many forms.  In all cases, there must be a follower for a leader to exist.  Leaders engender willing followers.  We want to learn from others who have been successful.  We want to take direction from someone who has demonstrated skill at problem-solving.  We want to mimic the behaviors of inspiring people. 

What is a Wagile Leader?

Before we discuss Wagile leadership, I want to take a quick detour to define Wagile.  Wagile is a product innovation process to create and launch groundbreaking new products and services.  The word Wagile comes from a combination of the terms “waterfall” and “agile”.  Waterfall approaches to project management use upfront planning while agile project management acts on an evolving scope of work. 

The Wagile philosophy thus integrates the best of both project management approaches.

  • Move fast
  • Practice discipline
  • Understand risk
  • Engaged customers
  • Provide autonomy

Wagile Roles in Leadership

Each Wagile role serves as a leader.  Being non-hierarchical and flexible, Wagile does not specify one person, one role, or one organization as a primary decision-maker.  Rather, all roles act as leaders to ensure customer satisfaction with new product development (NPD).  As described in detail here, the Wagile roles include:

  • Project leader,
  • Customer representative,
  • Team leader, and
  • Cross-functional team. 

Wagile leadership characteristics focus on engaging customers to deliver high-quality products and services that meet market needs while generating profit for the firm.  Servant leadership traits of putting the team before self are important as are elements of Emotional Intelligence (such as self-awareness and self-control).  I have observed that the most successful teams are mission-oriented to create a common good rather than egocentric to promote a manager’s self-interest. 

In my practice of innovation teaching and coaching, I often used work style assessments to drive the leadership conversation.  An important starting point for product innovation teams is the Innovation Health Assessment™ to benchmark your organization’s NPD maturity against industry standards.  (Take your complimentary Innovation Health Assessment here.)   

Another work style assessment I use is called the Team Dimensions Profile.  As a DiSC-certified management facilitator, I prefer the language of Team Dimensions for innovation team growth.  We identify individual working preferences as Creator, Advancer, Refiner, or Executer.  Note that these are not the same as ingrained personality because each of us can stretch to different work roles as needed to accomplish the project goals.  (Learn more about Team Dimensions here where I spoke with the Everyday Innovator podcast.) 

In fact, it is the capability of team members on a Wagile project to stretch and serve as generalist-specialists that make each of us leaders.  Generalist-specialists are people who have a deep knowledge and expertise in one arena (specialist) but also a desire to learn and help across the board (generalist). 

Learn More

If you want to know more about Wagile and how to apply it in your own organization, join me for a short seminar on 10 November 2020 (2-4 pm CST).  Upon completion of this course, you will be equipped with a set of tools to speed product to market for innovation success.  Register here.  To investigate and expand your personal development style, please join me for the Life Design Master Mind Q&A on 11 November 2020 at 11 am CST (free), followed by subsequent in-depth workshops over the next six months.  Register here for the free webinar.  Contact me at [email protected] with questions about these workshops. 

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A Division of Global NP Solutions, LLC  

Study.       Learn.       Earn.       Simple.

About Me

I am inspired by writing, teaching, and coaching.  I tackle life with an infusion of rigor, zeal, and faith.   It brings me joy to help you build innovation leaders.  Teresa Jurgens-Kowal is an experienced innovation professional with a passion for lifelong learning with a PhD in Chemical Engineering and an MBA in Computer and Information Decision Making.  My credentials include PE (State of Louisiana), NPDP, PMP®, and CPEM, and I am a DiSC® certified facilitator.  Contact me at [email protected] or area code 281 + phone 787-3979 for more information on coaching for entrepreneurs and innovators.

Wagile Tools

For several weeks, we have been posting about the Wagile innovation process. 

Wagile is a hybrid new product development (NPD) process that brings together the best of waterfall (“w‑”)project management systems with Agile systems used for software development (“‑agile”).  The outcome is an innovation process that has a deep focus on customer needs while managing risk (investment) through a disciplined approach. 

Product Innovation Tools

Most innovation processes include checklists of what has to be done and when.  In a traditional staged-and-gated process, the business case must be completed in order to pass a certain gate.  Market testing must be completed before going to market with a new product, etc.  (Read more about product innovation tools here.)

Likewise, Scrum specifies a checklist of features (known as the “product backlog”) to complete during a sprint.  Sprints are short periods of time in which the project team works on the list of tasks provided by the business.  Tasks that are not finished in the prescribed two- to four-week period are added to the “sprint backlog” and rollover to the next sprint – akin to a never ending “To Do” list. 

What’s missing in both the traditional waterfall and Agile processes is the “How To.”  Of course, every project is unique and different.  The fun and beauty of working in innovation is the variety and diversity of tasks, activities, and projects.  Yet, each time we encounter a new situation, we can (and should) follow a given process to understand the situation (such as risk analysis) and to design solutions.  In Wagile, we deploy a set of innovation tools to tackle the “how to” of each stage of work. 

Wagile Stages and Gates

Wagile Stages and Wagile Gates are designed to involve the customer.  After all, no innovation is valuable unless it meets a need in the marketplace and is saleable.  Wagile tools use Design Thinking methods to gather customer insights and couple those inputs with measurable decision and performance standards.  As a reminder the Wagile Stages and Gates are indicated here. 

  • 1:  Opportunity Identification (Idea Gate)
  • 2:  Business Case (Functional Gate)
  • 3:  Technology Development (Technology Gate)
  • 4:  Scale-Up (Constructability Gate)
  • 5:  Production (Launch Gate)

Design Thinking Tools

To learn more about Design Thinking tools, read our previous post Tools for Product Innovation based on the work of Carlos Rodriguez (Delaware State University).  Design Thinking is a customer-focused methodology to creatively and collaboratively solve customer problems.  We involve the customer in defining problems and in creating solutions.  We work collaboratively with cross-functional teams, both internally and externally.  We ask questions and we listen. 

Early in the Wagile product innovation process, we use observation and interviewing to gather customer insights.  The Design Thinking tools of customer empathy map and customer journey map are deployed in Stage 1 (Opportunity Identification) to discover and define the customer problem.  Download information on these tools here.  An important outcome of the tools and activities in this stage is to determine if the gain for the customer is greater than the pain of acquiring and learning a new product. 

An Example

I try to maintain a high level of fitness.  I swim, bike, and lift weights.  Recently, my husband got me a new Fitbit that allows me to track all exercises instead of just counting steps.  It’s very convenient as I only have to select the correct icon, push start, and then press finish for each activity.  And if I forget, the device automatically senses that I am cycling instead of running and tracks the calories burned. 

However, I do not wear my new Fitbit when I go swimming.  The pain is greater than the gain.  Since swimming is still under the arbitrary restrictions of corona-panic, the pool is only open for 45 minutes at a time.  My existing swim tracker records the number of laps, strokes per lap, efficiency, and calories burned.  I would incur a transaction cost (lost time in the water) to calibrate my swim watch with the Fitbit.  Right now, I view that cost as higher than the benefit (one device for all activities).  Your customers will also weigh costs and benefits as they consider purchasing a new or updated upgraded product. 

Design Tools in Wagile

Each stage in Wagile is defined to include specific tools to evaluate cost/benefit of an innovation.  Design Thinking tools take the perspective of the customer.  Later stages in Wagile use financial assessment tools (coupled with customer satisfaction measures) to determine cost/benefit from the company’s perspective.  Remember organizations are in business to make money and deliver value to shareholders.  Join me on 11 November for a Wagile tutorial and learn to apply Design Thinking tools in your innovation process!  Register here. 

Learn More

  • Check out where I’m speaking next (click here) and book me for your next event.
  • Get your copy of The Innovation ANSWER Book available at Amazon (now available on Kindle).
  • Vote on the cover of my next book, The Innovation QUESTION Book here.
  • Reference the new PDMA Body of Knowledge, available at Amazon.
  • Get your NPDP Certification!  Join our October online class (Thursdays) following the brand new, 2nd edition PDMA Body of Knowledge.  REGISTER HERE!

About Me

I am inspired by writing, teaching, and speaking at great professional events.  I tackle life with an infusion of rigor, zeal, and faith.   It brings me joy to help you build innovation leaders.  Teresa Jurgens-Kowal is an experienced innovation professional with a passion for lifelong learning with a PhD in Chemical Engineering and an MBA in Computer and Information Decision Making.  My credentials include PE (State of Louisiana), NPDP, PMP®, and CPEM, and I am a DiSC® certified facilitator.  Contact me at [email protected] or area code 281 + phone 787-3979 for more information on coaching for entrepreneurs and innovators.

© Simple-PDH.com

A Division of Global NP Solutions, LLC  

Study.       Learn.       Earn.       Simple.

Wagile Gates

Have you ever jumped ahead of yourself just to realize later that you missed a step?  Have you ever launched a new product to find out that consumers didn’t actually like the feature configuration?  Have you ever made a mistake and then realized it was dejá vu all over again? 

All of us make mistakes.  We learn from making errors and we learn by knowing what not to do.  In product innovation, learning from failure is an important trait for organizations to succeed over the long run.  In fact, learning is at the heart of the Wagile Philosophy (read more here).  However, making the same mistake twice – or three times or four times – is not learning.  Repeated errors demonstrate the lack of quality systems and an absence of a directing process. 

What is Wagile?

Fragile is a hybrid new product development (NPD) process.  Wagile balances the structure of a traditional, waterfall system with the iterative and customer-focused nature of an Agile development process (like Scrum).  The Wagile philosophy emphasizes moving fast while practicing discipline and understanding risks.  Wagile uses both stages of work and gates as checkpoints for product innovation. 

Wagile Gates

Gate reviews in NPD are predominant in traditional waterfall processes, like Bob Cooper’s Stage-Gate™ system.  Gate reviews serve as checkpoints to gauge completion of work-to-date and a plan for future project work.  In practice, there should be no surprises at a gate review and the cross-functional team that approves the go-forward plan should understand the scope, schedule, and budget well before the formal meeting. 

Gate reviews are important elements in any NPD process.  In Scrum, we call this review a “retrospective” (read more about Scrum here).  The purpose of a gate or retrospective is the same:  Do customers want the product as we are designing it?  Can we make a profit?  Is this new product aligned with our strategic goals and objectives? 

Entry and Exit Gates

Entry gates are a pet peeve of mine.  The entry gate is approved simply by showing that work on the previous stage is complete.  That’s a great accomplishment for the team, but what matters more for innovation is whether the go-forward plan makes sense. 

In contrast, an exit gate evaluates both the prior work and approves the product design for future work.  The multi-disciplinary management team approving the project at an exit gate must have appropriate budgetary authority for the next stage of work.  In this way, risk and strategic alignment are addressed throughout the life of the project. 

The Wagile Gate Sequence

Wagile gates are designed as exit gates, to ensure go-forward work will advance product innovation and the overall product portfolio.  The following lists the Wagile gates and the expected outcome of each decision. 

  • 1-Opportunity Gate.  The Opportunity Gate validates that the product idea and concept meet a target market need.  Enough testing has been done to demonstrate customer wants and needs for the new product.  Importantly, decision-makers approve the concept is having a potential profit and fit with the organization’s strategic growth goals.  Passing the Opportunity Gate means a project team is authorized to investigate the scope of design, development, and market impacts. 
  • 2-Business Case.  It is important to justify a project early enough to not waste resources.  While any project will have more information gathered during execution, unattractive projects should be killed early.  Reviewers of the Business Case approve that the new product fits the organization’s growth goals, is strategically aligned, and will meet profitability expectations for the level of innovation involved.  This approval funds the technology and market development efforts. 
  • 3-Technology Gate.  The Technology Gate builds on the Business Case gate.  Cost of development is balanced against anticipated sales and customer needs.  Costs are at the forefront as are feasibility studies.  The Technology Gate grants approval for developing at scale.  This gate may include approval of licensing and early order equipment items. 
  • 4-Constructability Gate.  At the Constructability Gate, the cross-functional decision-makers commit to building production facilities, supply and distribution chains, and marketing collateral.  Bob Cooper often discusses a “money gate” in his work, essentially a point of no return.  In some ways, the Constructability Gate serves as this “money gate”.  Yet the iterative nature of Wagile allows a project to undergo appropriate iterations thereby ensuring quality control and risk are managed within the tolerance level of the organization. 
  • 5-Launch.  The Launch Gate represents the go-to-market decision for a new product.  Measures of profitability will validate earlier decisions (e.g. the business case).  However, the Wagile process encourages continued adjustment of the product offering to meet customer needs.  Engaged customers help the Project Leader and Customer Representative gain market insights for the life of the product and as inputs for next generation products.  Read more about Wagile Roles here.

Using Wagile Gates

Like any project management system, Wagile uses gate reviews as checkpoints to gauge the progress of work .  Unlike traditional waterfall processes, not passing a gate is not a punitive measure for the team.  Instead, the flexibility of learning is built into Wagile and “no” decision at a gate review simply means a better opportunity is available.  Believe me, team members prefer the option of working on a new project over scolding for not meeting entry gate criteria! 

Gates provide discipline in Wagile that is often missing in Scrum or other Agile processes.  Discipline is important for both teams and senior management to increase creativity  and to increase profitability.  Wagile further builds flexibility into gate reviews by the hybrid nature of the system. 

Learn More

  • Learn more about Wagile Product Development in my Webcast with PDMA on 10 September (register here). 
  • Delve into the full Wagile process in a virtual, facilitated workshop on 10 November 2020 (register here).  Workshop participants have access to downloadable templates and tools to fast track innovation!
  • Check out where I’m speaking next (click here) and book me for your next event.
  • Get your copy of The Innovation ANSWER Book available at Amazon (now available on Kindle).
  • Vote on the cover of my next book, The Innovation QUESTION Book here.
  • Reference the new PDMA Body of Knowledge, available at Amazon.
  • Get your NPDP Certification!  Join our October online class (Thursdays) following the brand new, 2nd edition PDMA Body of Knowledge.  REGISTER HERE!

About Me

I am inspired by writing, teaching, and speaking at great professional events.  I tackle life with an infusion of rigor, zeal, and faith.   It brings me joy to help you build innovation leaders.  Teresa Jurgens-Kowal is an experienced innovation professional with a passion for lifelong learning with a PhD in Chemical Engineering and an MBA in Computer and Information Decision Making.  My credentials include PE (State of Louisiana), NPDP, PMP®, and CPEM, and I am a DiSC® certified facilitator.  Contact me at [email protected] or area code 281 + phone 787-3979 for more information on coaching for entrepreneurs and innovators.

© Simple-PDH.com

A Division of Global NP Solutions, LLC  

Study.       Learn.       Earn.       Simple.