think carrie, think!

I’m taking Product Planning and Development this term, which is a mini… this means that my last class is this coming Tuesday. For our final assignment, we were asked to create some sort of idea map using some of the things we learned over the past eight weeks.

I decided to incorporate the stage-gate process, a fairly standard product development process used by companies, and branding, another aspect of the product development process, while trying to infuse a touch of the iterative process used by designers.

The stage-gate process is a process that works exactly as it sounds: a bunch of different stages, separated by gates—points at which the team decides whether or not they can proceed with the development of their product. On paper, it’s a very linear process:

… however, I have a feeling that this isn’t the most effective and true way to think about new product development. As a designer who uses a design process somewhat similar to this stage-gate process (… minus all the gates), I’ve learned that processes like this don’t function at their best when worked linearly. We work more iteratively and back-and-forth. Nothing is ever set in stone at any stage in the design process. So, I decided to change the stage-gate process a bit, while bringing in the different stages and thoughts behind branding (click to enlarge):

I understand that companies have budget and time issues and so these ‘gates’ become critical in moving products forward, or keeping them from being released. My intention was not to completely change the model, but just to introduce a little bit more movement and dialogue between the different stages. At the same time, I took some ideas about branding and divided them into stages that I thought fit into the product development process.

My prof, Matt Beale (president of Daedalus Excel), agreed that companies do indeed work more in this way. And while this project wasn’t an gigantic exploration into mocking up a new model for new product development, it was an interesting exercise to think about product development and branding, as I am still fairly new to both these fields.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 13th, 2007 and is filed under business, design, school.