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Forbes
10 hours ago
- Business
- Forbes
The Organizational Mistake That Can Stall New Product Success
Ryan Gray is Co-Founder and CEO of SGW Designworks, a product engineering and design firm featured in The Lean Startup. Should your engineering department be doing product development? Two decades ago, when I was employed by a fortune 500 company within their new product development group, I was immersed in big-budget projects with massive cross-functional teams. Those projects often focused on developing a new product, as well as the technology to manufacture it—in parallel. In that setting, the business made a clear distinction between staff focused on engineering versus those focused on Product Development. Today, I've got sixteen years of experience working with smaller and mid-sized businesses to develop new products. The businesses we work with are typically not running multiple new product development projects with eight-figure budgets in parallel like a Fortune 500 might. Instead, they are trying to get the most out of each talented team member. In these businesses, we often see leaders intentionally conflate engineering departments with new product development teams. Why does this happen? There are a few drivers: • Businesses hire engineers to provide field support, incrementally improve the product line and get the most out of manufacturing processes. On paper, these engineers have the skills to develop new products as well. • SMBs are resource-constrained: sometimes by cash, sometimes by talent pool limitations. It becomes the norm for team members to wear multiple hats. • Leadership recognizes that the engineering team that supports the product line is probably the group most knowledgeable about the product, how it's made, and its weaknesses. It would seem that this positions them well to create the next generation of product. These drivers lead to organizational structures that ignore the important differences in the skills required to support a product line versus the work required to create new tech, features and products. Let's dig deeper: Characteristics Of A High-Performing Engineering Team The most effective engineering teams I've worked with focus on solving product or manufacturing problems to help enable sales growth. This means supporting users, making product changes (and related manufacturing changes) to address product shortcomings, and cost-optimizing at the product and process level. This type of team thrives in situations with defined constraints, where the problems to solve are measurable. Characteristics Of A High-Performing Product Development Team Product development teams with a high rate of success (meaning launched, profitable products) focus on understanding use cases, challenging assumptions about feature sets, figuring out what's possible with today's tech (and what will be possible with tomorrow's), running disciplined regimens of experiments, navigating product feature pivots and aligning the product manufacturing path to business goals. This team runs with less defined, more exploratory work. And while engineers often play a key role in executing it, effective new product development requires a different mindset: one that balances creativity, technical experimentation and business acumen. The Risk Of Combining Roles Is there overlap between engineering and product development? Certainly. But people who excel in one area are often less effective—and less satisfied—in the other. Engineering tends to reward precision and predictability. Product development, on the other hand, demands comfort with failure, iteration and shifting targets. When one team is responsible for both supporting existing products and creating new ones, it creates organizational drag. Prioritization becomes murky. People gravitate toward what's familiar. Sales support requests, field issues and manufacturing challenges will almost always displace exploratory design and prototyping. The end result? New product efforts can stall. Building The Right Structure Successful new product development in SMBs requires explicit role clarity, even if the teams are small. That doesn't always mean building two separate departments—but it does mean being deliberate about expectations, timelines and resource allocation between engineering and new product development efforts. Some practices that help: • Define clear responsibilities for roles in engineering and NPD separately, especially if the same people contribute to both. • Set aside focused time and resources for product development efforts that's protected from daily operational noise. • Ensure leadership understands the trade-offs involved in dual-role assignments. • Consider using an outside team for your new product development efforts, keeping the internal engineering team focused on their critical responsibilities. Good new products don't typically emerge from your engineering department. In fact, assuming they will—without providing the time, tools and team structure to support true product development—can quietly sabotage your growth strategy. Ask yourself this: Are you expecting your engineers to innovate while they're busy keeping the existing product alive? If the answer is yes, it may be time to rethink your structure and resourcing plan. Product development deserves its own space. Without it, even the best ideas may never make it off the whiteboard. Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?
Forbes
20-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
An Alternative To Tariff Panic: Six Tips For Product Developers
Ryan Gray is co-founder and CEO of SGW Designworks , a full-service product development and engineering firm featured in The Lean Startup. getty I often tell people that building a business around manufactured products is a lifestyle choice. Those of us who are drawn to the world of physical products, how they work and how they're made often find it really rewarding to develop and build new things. But the world of hardware products is nuanced—and hard to be profitable in. Even in stable economies, variables beyond our control can determine whether our hardware products are successful. Components can go end-of-life (EOL), manufacturing partners' leadership turnover can lead to quality issues, materials can become scarce and regulations can morph. Add to that a new variable—tariffs—and things start to feel wholly unmanageable. But beyond the uncertainty many businesses are feeling today, how should these new realities impact how we develop and produce our products? How do we position our next generation of products to be successful and provide the financial returns we need to justify their existence in our businesses? What design decisions does this drive early in the development process? I recently had a call with the vice president of product at one of our client companies. Her company markets an enterprise electronics device, comprised of a printed circuit board assembly (PCBA) with injection-molded and sheet metal enclosure parts. She uses a contract manufacturer in Malaysia to produce a product that our product development firm designed for her. We helped her get the manufacturer lined up, and at the time, they were a great choice. They were a bit more expensive than a competitor in China, but they were easier to work with. They also had a strong track record, solid quality control systems and a dedicated point of contact for her. But as new tariffs were announced in April, she realized the landed cost for her products could increase significantly. She was looking for advice. Should she relocate production? Were there other options she should be considering? I shared the following advice with this client and encourage other businesses facing a similar situation to keep the same in mind: 1. Don't force a decision right away. It seems like there's a chance things could look different in a few months, but nobody knows quite how, exactly. It would be a shame to make a costly decision to move production only to find that the tariff-loaded costs shift, changing the outcome. 2. Dive deep to figure out what impact your competitors are feeling. Are your competitors manufacturing in China? If so, you might be in a great position if you both raise your prices to fully cover the tariff burden. And if this is the case, perhaps prepare for a marketing campaign focused on your price position relative to the competition. This could be a great time to pick up market share. 3. Compare the cost impacts of redesigning the product to exclude specific features. Do this with an emphasis on 'tool-safe' changes, or changes that will not require new production tooling. 4. Understand the real implications of moving production. In my experience, it is almost always extremely difficult, if not impossible, to move production tooling from one manufacturer to another, so analyze the cost to produce new tooling, purchase the board-level components and place the initial production order. This is going to tie up a lot of cash. 5. Revisit product designs. If it does seem attractive to move production after considering No. 4 above, recognize that we are looking at purchasing new tooling, so now is a great time to revise the product to make any tweaks or additions that customers have been asking for. Look at a bit of product redesign and refresh, and build the quote package with that design. I also recommend checking for any onboard-level components that are about to go EOL, since now is a good time to redesign the PCBA accordingly. 6. Think carefully about what the switchover from one manufacturer to another will look like. How long will it really take to get production units out of the new manufacturer? And what could changes in the tariff landscape look like between now and then? How long will you need to run both in parallel and how much working capital will that require? The Takeaway Ultimately, the right path for that client of ours, and anybody in the manufactured product space, is driven by the interplay of many different variables. But there are things companies can proactively do to help identify their best options and maybe even turn this upset condition into a business advantage for product lines. Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?
