It's time for a Paradigm Shift in Product Development...

After visiting hundreds of companies looking for product development best practices, we've found that almost every company has the same fundamental processes, the same fundamental behaviors, and the same underwhelming results; for example:

• Do your engineers spend less than 30% of their time working directly on the product design?
• Is there minimal learning from one project to the next?
• Is there minimal collaboration between separate teams?
• Is your project management primarily an administrative activity?
• Are your project plans understood to always be out-of-date?
• Are your design reviews more focused on task completion and compliance than on the quality of the results?
• Does all development stop for two to three weeks prior to a gate review?
• Are process loop-backs expected and common?
• Do you typically miss your major milestones?

If you answered "yes" to many of those questions, you owe it to yourself and your team to read on...

There are a few exceptions to the above... very few... Toyota would answer every question above with a strong "no". And that translates to the bottom-line; for example, Toyota is more profitable than the next five most profitable auto makers combined!

Do they do it by being smarter, working harder, executing the traditional development processes better, implementing phase gate systems, six sigma, or waste reduction? No!! In fact, if you look closely, you'll see that they've actually turned Product Development on its ear... what they do represents a fundamental paradigm shift.

Unfortunately, you cannot just copy Toyota and expect greatness. You need to understand why they do what they do, and apply it to your company, retaining what makes your company better than your competitors. Those fundamental differences we have identified and organized into a system we call Learning-First Product Development.

To enable this revolutionary paradigm shift, we have developed a training program that can be deployed in an evolutionary manner, delivering value every step along the way, but ultimately transforming your development teams into an entirely new mode, where retained learning is the norm, and that knowledge is leveraged into a stream of innovative, best-in-class products.

For more on who we are, please check out Our Mission and Our Beginning.

For more on what we do, please look at What do we do?

See Us at:

Lean Product and Process Development Exchange

Denver, Colorado

April 21-23, 2008

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