Practical Guidelines for Product Development

Here are some practical guidelines to follow when developing a product:

1. Make the wait time and flow of work visible.
2. Quantify cost of delays and factor it into your product decisions.
3. Do not aim for 100% utilization, be comfortable with introducing slack.
4. Focus on the response time instead of efficiency.
5. To enable smaller batch sizes and faster feedback, find ways to reduce the processing cost.
6. Experimentation in small batch to reduce impact of failure.
7. Be agile and will to change the product development plan as new information becomes available sometimes plan needs to change.
8. Don’t start without full commitment.
9. Keep the product simple. Extra features add complexity.
10. Experiment early and frequently to eliminate the bad options in the beginning.
11. Overlapping and iterative process designs work better than linear.
12. Focus on quick feedback instead of trying to get it right the first time.

Reference: Six Myths of Product Development by Stefan Thomke and Donald Reinertsen