Product Strategy
For organizations moving from prototype to production, there are a lot of decisions that must be made about how to source parts and build the product. A major part of this process is deciding what can be done in-house, and what must be outsourced. (And who are the partners, and how closely can they be [...]
I wrote a bit on Tuesday about the importance of documenting part information during the design process, and today I’d like to talk about another type of documentation that is commonly overlooked in organizations—the documentation of fixtures and jigs. We talk to many people working in high-functioning manufacturing departments who document everything thoroughly and consistently [...]
Most manufacturers strive for growth and expansion, looking for opportunities to gain greater market share and see their products succeed. But the truth is, today’s opportunities for expansion often come at unexpected times and in unexpected ways. And if a company is not well-equipped with the organizational, product development and manufacturing processes to capitalize on [...]
A recent Harvard Business Review (HBR) blog post makes the case for experimentation as a key part of the product development process. Authors H. James Wilson and Kevin Desouza cite a December 2010 Babson Executive Education survey of 149 senior executives, in which 51% of respondents say that “experimentation is now their organization’s preferred approach [...]
Marc wrote recently about the motorized bicycle that is the latest addition to the Volkswagen product line and a way for the company to extend its brand into an adjacent market. And while innovation is often at the heart of new product development, it is worth pointing out that building a product line can be [...]
According to Marty Neumeier in his excellent book, The Brand Gap, a brand, simply put, is “a person’s gut feeling about a product, service or organization.” But all too often, when considering a product roadmap, companies become hemmed in by what they perceive to be their expertise without realizing just how many things can contribute [...]
Anyone building products for the public or handling product service should check out this blog post chronicling a woman’s battle for appropriate customer service with a washing machine company—and how her public complaints to social networking sites got results. Her story is both hilarious and a great object lesson about the power of social media in [...]
When I was a design consultant, potential clients would tell us all about how their cool new products were going to take over the market. Sometimes a company’s product really was cool and new–though it was doubtful it was going to make its mark in the manner envisioned. Occasionally a company was so enamored with [...]
My Pragmatic Marketing mug stares at me every morning with the same stark reminder: Your opinion, although interesting, is irrelevant. It’s a nice grounding statement, and more constructive than my Onion mug. But my mug delivers more than caffeinated goodness—it delivers a message that I need to step back whenever I get excited about a [...]
Welcome to the official blog of Arena Solutions. If you haven’t heard of Arena, the quick version is this: Arena serves small and mid-size manufacturers by providing on-demand software (also known as software-as-a-service or a SaaS solution) for managing bills of materials (BOMs), the engineering change process and supplier communication. In other words, we help [...]
