The new new product development game

“Agile” can be said to have started when in 1986 Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka published an article in the Harvard Business Review called “The New New Product Development Game“.  Takeuchi was a professor in the strategy unit of Harvard Business School and Nonaka a university professor in Tokyo.  They were looking at the development of innovative products and the approaches which had been used to create them.

This article is central to many ideas on this site. I remember reading this paper early in my career and being startled by its implications.  It proposed a way of working which was substantially different from how I had been taught to view businesses to date.  While it is now over 30 years old, “The New New Product Development Game” is still a paper that I reread regularly and I seem to get more from it every time I visit it. 

“The New New Product Development Game” is the key “must read” article on Agile

Sequential development

In a traditional flow, business analysist might specify a set of requirements and hand these over to architects.  These structure the bones of the solution, and hand over to designers to consider the user interface.  And then on to coders and testers and eventually the solution is complete.

Takeuchi and Nonaka are clear that this is too inflexible. We need to shift from a sequential form of development to something designed for speed and flexibility.

The traditional sequential or “relay race” approach to product development …
may conflict with the goals of maximum speed and flexibility

The New New Product Development Game

 The new game

The paper goes on to suggest what this new approach looks like, based on case studies of organizations which have taken a new approach.  These organizations built teams with diverse skills.  They gave them unheard of freedom.  They encouraged (even forced) them to work together as a team to solve a problem together.  One team were asked to develop a new personal computer.  They were responsible for every aspect of this product – manufacturing, selling, and servicing it.  Another young team had to develop a whole new concept car from scratch.

The approach is described with a sports analogy which Takeuchi and Nonaka refer to as “the rugby game”.  The focus was on teams.  Teams with a high level of autonomy, free to set their own direction.  Teams with diverse skills that shared ideas across all the functions of the business, rather than having sequential specialisations.  Teams that learned and adapted to the changing environment.

A … holistic approach — where a team tries to go the distance as a unit,
passing the ball back and forth—may better serve today’s competitive requirements

The New New Product Development Game

The analogy of rugby, as a game based on high individual commitment but success through team co-operation, was later picked up in the use of the term “Scrum” for a specific Agile approach.

Organisational change

Takeuchi and Nonaka realised that these changes had an impact across all of the organization.  The challenge wasn’t just in the team itself.  If this approach were to work, the organization had to change in how the team was managed.  It was clear that the autonomy of the teams necessarily meant a cultural change in the whole organization. This meant a new approach to management and to teams.

They saw the management role as limited to building the environment and slightly steering the team.  This is a process they referred to as “subtle control”.  Rather than being directive or micromanaging, the management role is to set the environment for success.