Product managers in the consumer-goods industry tend to fit a more traditional profile, with a focus on project management and tactical execution. More than three-quarters of companies in our sample made widespread use of product volume, revenue, unit cost, and time-to-market KPIs. Todays market research shows customers want more than a traditional car ownership experience. The first step should be a thorough and rapid assessment through benchmarking, diagnosing, and pursuing development. Please email us at: World Economic Forum: A preview of Davos 2023, Author Talks: The worlds longest study of adult development finds the key to happy living, The executives guide to new-business building. Subscribed to {PRACTICE_NAME} email alerts. product management leadership development model. For example, Microsoft copying Netscapes web browser and using its dominance of operating system distribution to win, or Google copying Overtures pay per click model and using its existing dominance in search to sell ads. Over 80 percent of those projects were late, and the average overrun was nearly 30 percent. Today, some companies are adopting a new approach, one that uses powerful data analysis and modeling techniques to bring new clarity to the estimation of project-resource requirements. The first root cause is underestimating the complexity of the project. In this approach, the OEMs CX team is involved in the entire R&D process, from the initiation of the project to SOP and life cycle management. One consumer-goods maker sought to enter a new product segment while maintaining its unique brand position in the market. More than 40 percent of consumers also say they will use connectivity services more in the future, and about the same number are willing to pay for connected services. Direct customer interactions or feedback remain rare and limit the voice of the customer in important product decisions. This requires that OEMs and suppliers shift their current development processes toward a cyclical, more integrated pattern and establish R&D steering approaches that connect software and hardware development along the entire life cycle of the vehicle. The product-development process must integrate input from design, engineering, sales, marketing, procurement, and other functions. The modern product manager emerged from this evolution as a central role. For example, some organizations defined Horizon 1 as new features that could be delivered in the short term of three to 12 months, Horizon 2 as business model extensions that will be ready 24 to 36 months out, and Horizon 3 as creating new disruptive products or business models 36 to 72 months out. Based on reverse engineering, product innovation design and 3D-printing technology, a technical route for the rapid design and development of helmet products has been constructed, and optimize the . Fusing data and design to supercharge innovationin products and processes. We'll email you when new articles are published on this topic. To understand how quickly Horizon 3 products can come to market, consider some examples. In fact, its the speed of deployment of Horizon 3 products, strategies, and capabilities that are a devastating upset to the status quo. McKinsey Study Supports Balanced Product Portfolio. The. In addition, analytical models provide a powerful new way to deal with constraints. This dynamic will place more importance on roles and skill sets that involve orchestrating and integrating product-development processes. The product manager has emerged as a crucial force to steer this process and balance these lenses. Agile methodologies in hardware development and concept sprints have recently gained momentum as effective tools for steering the innovation process because they promote an iterative, build-to-learn mentality. Weekly progress reports enable managers to track progress between CX and R&D teams and their alignment on requirement changes. They should optimize project assumptions (including levels of reuse, which technical concepts to use, and the amount of outsourcing) to prioritize R&D resources for the most important projects. That meant significant extra testing and integration work, which the analytical models identified. The use of function points in the industry, ISBSG, October 2016, isbsg.org. While the majority of the companies in our sample monitor customers satisfaction with product performance, only 44 percent of them measure customers satisfaction with the price they paid for the value they received. Likewise, proactive risk and error detection actions will improve overall productivity based on predictive maintenance and machine learning algorithms, as will intelligent talent and team management techniques such as capacity management and scheduling. A suitable reference system architecture is the key to successful systems engineering. Automotive OEMs are undergoing an essential transformation from experience-based engineering toward data-driven, virtual engineering. The product manager is well positioned to guide this process as a scrum master would, leading frequent iteration and collaboration across company stakeholders. Conventional complexity metrics, like counting lines of code, story points, or function points (FPs) in software development, are difficult to estimate before the start of a project, especially one that requires many sprints from many teams to complete. The introduction of new teams, new platforms, or new development approaches can also hit productivity in the short term, even if they are intended to boost it over the long haul. The result is a faster, more reliable way to bring all of an organizations expertise together in finding the best options for delivering value to customers. The team should set targets for all core steering dimensions, especially material costs, R&D costs, and capital expenditures, centered on benchmark-based target costing. They should implement end-to-end product development steering and controlling basedon a single source of truth. The process took 1 day. Boston, Massachusetts, United States. We believe consumer-goods companies can gain insights from how the product-manager role has emerged in the tech industryand, increasingly, in digital companies outside of techto solve persistent challenges in consumer-product development. And traditional methods often fail to account for other external factors, like the programming and development styles adopted by the development team, multisite development, and the impact of challenges the team is facing for the first time. The systems landscape and data backbone must feature a common product structure that enables end-to-end steering from a systems perspective for team leads and department leads, all managed by the R&D controlling staff. And if it cant, the company can run what-if analyses to evaluate the impact of dropping certain features or simplifying performance requirements. The goal is to achieve customer-centered product development with integrated feedback from customers in short iteration cycles, where the voice of the customer sets the pace for the product development process. Their initial project plans are sometimes no more than educated guesswork. As an example, at one company, a project to create a derivative of a newly released product was originally expected to take just 300 person-weeks of effort. This is extremely difficult for large companies or government agencies as it is as much a culture and process problem as a technology problem. Regional regulations and the cybersecurity ecosystem will in part enable this change. We combine services and software to help companies unlock procurement value from spend insights. When they reevaluated the plan using analytic models, they found that the project would actually take three or four times as much effort. The Product Strategy Playbook from McKinsey Alum - Free PPT Templates PRODUCT STRATEGY THE BIG PICTURE ON PRODUCT STRATEGY 1. To study the impact of individual KPIs on short- and long-term financial performance, we compared the average of each of our two metrics for companies that used a given indicator with the average for those that did not. The company then sought to develop a bold new look that would serve as a statement upon entering the new product category. Rapidly copy the new disruptive innovators and use the incumbents business model to dominate. McKinsey helps companies transform their product management capabilities by helping build the talent capabilities and putting in place the right product operating model and infrastructure, tailored for your product context. In that time, weve interviewed hundreds of project stakeholders, including executive managers, technical leaders, and program and project managers. Led teams of up to eight consultants in growth strategy, marketing & sales, and technical product . The first use case takes advantage of advanced simulation techniques to improve multiphysics simulations via surrogate models or virtual testing with an AI-based driver in the loop. Per Year (Employer est. To existing competitors, or to existing government requirements and acquisition systems, these new products/services look like minimum viable products barely finished, iterative, and incremental prototypes. In our experience, the primary skills of a modern product manager are often dispersed across a number of talented individuals. This makes intuitive sense, as understanding your customers real requirements, delivering on your promises, and offering strong value for money are good ways to build reputation and customer loyalty. OEMs must transition from working with several suppliers to creating alliances and partnerships centered on key technological control points, while tier-one suppliers must adapt to software sales and develop solutions in partnership with OEMs. In the commercial space Uber took existing technology (smartphone app, drivers) but built a unique business model (gig economy disrupting taxis). This research is at an early stage. It is not the same as the conventional list of competencies used to assess employees; instead, it should reflect the organizations strategy and priorities. Consumer-goods companies face a unique set of challenges. Its paired with algorithms based on machine learning to intelligently collect data at scale and identify interesting situations to propel the development of Level 4 and Level 5 autonomous-driving features or optimize driver-assistance features. (When I say business model I dont just mean private businesses, but also government agencies, nonprofits, and others who have a mission model instead.). setting up a new branch), or product development (e.g. Access more than 40 courses trusted by Fortune 500 companies. They assume that specifications will not change and that resources will be available when needed. Something went wrong. Indeed, the average relative-profit growth of the companies that did use this metric was 12.9 percentage points higher than those that did not (Exhibit 2). That allows a much more thoughtful, fact-based discussion, far preferable to missed deadlines or being forced to drop features at the last minute because they werent finished in time for launch. However, the trap of the Three Horizon model is not recognizing that today many disruptions can be rapidly implemented by repurposing existing Horizon 1 technologies into new business models and that speed of deployment is disruptive and asymmetric by itself. Built in a modular fashion, this program can be tailored to offer personalized learning journeys across different inflexion points in a product-oriented career. While traditional analysis suggests that Horizon 3 disruptive innovations take years to develop, in todays world this is no longer the case. It is important to note, however, that while this strategy will generate additional revenues, it will also create additional costs. They play a variety of roles, using a broad base of knowledge to make trade-offs, and convene cross-functional teams to align diverse functions. Traditionally, OEMs incorporated engineering capabilities based on the collective experience of their engineers and experts with only limited data on customer behavior and product performance in the field. Visit our Product Management & Development page, McKinsey_Website_Accessibility@mckinsey.com. The Fellow role at McKinsey is a specialed consulting position. The three horizons are no longer bounded by time. As partners and suppliers play an ever more important role in product-development and innovation activities, a systematic approach to developing these relationships provides benefits in both the short and long-term. For companies that outperformed their sector, this index of relative-profit growth would be positive, and the better their performance, the higher it would be. Freeing teams from strict budgetary limits may lead to product designs that perform better in the market. Today, however, tech and digital product managers are increasingly the mini-CEO of the product. Copyright 2008-2023, Glassdoor, Inc. "Glassdoor" and logo are registered trademarks of Glassdoor, Inc. Breakthrough innovation in product development is often not a straightforward process: it requires a company to continually pivot and iterate to identify and pursue the biggest opportunities and the right scope. 2. Until recently, even companies that understood and sought to address these issues didnt have effective tools for doing so. Nevertheless, the work reveals a number of intriguing and potentially counterintuitive findings. Similarly, the models will show if an aggressive budget or timeline can be made achievable by adding more resources. 2 are all secondary to speed of deployment and asymmetry. In this new environment, routine upgrades will happen throughout the vehicles life cycle, including over-the-air (OTA) updates to fix bugs, update software features, improve customer experiences, or sell new features not available at the time of the vehicles original sale. If you would like information about this content we will be happy to work with you. Organizations that apply analytics and predictive tools to their product-development and project-planning processes see a dramatic reduction in schedule slippage. Traditional tech product managers focused primarily on execution and were evaluated by the on-time delivery of engineering projects. Systems engineering is about breaking large, complex projects down into smaller, more manageable pieces and orchestrating the interfaces between them. McKinsey & Company Account Executive - Salt Lake City Salt Lake City, UT Easy Apply 30d+ McKinsey & Company Senior QA Engineer United States 30d+ McKinsey & Company Senior Director of Software Engineering United States 30d+ Unlock your team's curiosity and willingness to take smart risks. Finally, every organization should think hard about the way product-development budgets are used. It's All About Customer Value If you beat competitors at the customer value game, your products will win. Companies also need to articulate the product management leadership development modelfor the organization. Leads McKinseys global product development and procurement work and serves clients in materials, automotive and machinery sectors A career within our Operations Practice offers the opportunity to work with the biggest companies in the world, on projects that transform their core business and build resilience for the future. It represents a critical enabler and precondition for leaping into Level 4 and Level 5 autonomous driving. A study by McKinsey and Co., published in the Harvard Business Review found that "Companies . Typically, little data consistency exists across systems, and stakeholders base their planning and steering on different versions of data. Companies should base their product development steering efforts on holistic business case optimization. Other new regulations related to cybersecurity, systems to manage software updates, and the use of Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Level 3 autonomous-driving capabilities could also make future vehicle performance parameters more complex. McKinsey's Product Leadership Forum is a quarterly webinar that brings together product leaders across different markets and regions to discuss key and emerging global product management topics. Done right, product development will change the ways automotive companies conceive of, plan, engineer, and monetize new products, thus expanding their go-to-market strategy, business case, and revenue streams. Stages of the Product Development Cycle Incentivize external resources to focus on your goal or mission. Serves clients in consumer and retail and leads consumer durables and our growth by design work, Leads product optimization at McKinsey globally, using digital capabilities and analytics to improve product design and cost, Transforms operational performance and optimizes research and development for leading companies in the advanced industries sector, Advises oil and gas companies on capital projects, procurement, and strategy. Positioned at the intersection of a variety of functions, product managers must also have strong communication skills and diplomacy. Over the years, HBR articles have referenced the Three Horizons as a foundation of innovation strategy, here, here and here. Becoming customer centered also requires a new go-to-market model that features direct interactions between the OEM and the end customer. In another example, a company had a tight deadline to complete a new release for a big customer, with competitors vying for the work. For product-development leaders, our analysis offers some important insights. In our experience, companies face the following common pitfalls: Lack of well-defined goals. After SOP, the team drives CX upgrade opportunities and product life cycle management. Likewise, the approach applies iterative and incremental development processes to hardware and mechatronics development, synchronizing them with top-down planning. They can begin by looking to their internal design, brand management, and consumer-marketing teams as key sources of multi-lens talent, given the inherent focus of those teams on customers, end consumers, and innovation. McKinsey & Company. In software engineering, for example, those models would need to understand the complexity of the system requirements, the architectures, the testing, and the potential required interactions with hardware. Over the long term, however, companies should also measure the things that build customer loyalty, such as satisfaction with a products performance, price, and specifications. McKinsey helps companies transform their product management capabilities by helping build the talent capabilities and putting in place the right product operating model and infrastructure, tailored for your product context. Only 39 percent of the companies in our sample take a systematic approach to measuring project-team morale. A critical element of product development is instilling consumer centricity in the end-to-end process. Learn from top product professionals and thought leaders in a cohort-based learning program and get recognized with a graduation badge. A modern product manager fills both organic and inorganic gaps between team functions, providing connective tissue and promoting a much higher level of collaboration and alignment. At its heart, the new approach relies on the fact that, while every development project is unique, the underlying complexity drivers across projects are similar and can be quantified. Automakers should also increase their engineering efficiency and use their limited R&D resources most efficiently. Such investments can bring significant benefits: McKinsey analysis has found companies that invest in innovation during a crisis outperform the competition on market capitalization by 10 percent; investing in innovation after a crisis gives them a 30 percent advantage. These models can even identify the productivity impact of changes to working methods. design focus, and the evolution of software-development methodologies. This requires that all market players set up complex engineering networks around the world with global and regional hubs and partnerships. These managers can speak the language of every function: they have the technical knowledge to engage in engineering problem solving, yet they think strategically enough to support the businesss goals. Something went wrong. But to ensure that team members can make the leap from acting as project managers to product managers, companies will need to establish formal learning programs to complement on-the-job training. In a few of them, however, that fact was not widely known, suggesting that these companies were not using the metric as an active management tool. A total-cost-of-ownership approach, including considerations of. The product manager needs to be at the center of the development ecosystem, empowered to make decisions and resolve differences throughout the process with the support of senior leadership. Consumer beliefs and preferences will continue to evolve rapidly, forcing companies to redouble their efforts to embed the voice of the consumer throughout the product-development process. Software will be a key driver of customer experience and generate new revenue streams. The Product Management Academy leverages a field-and-forum approach and adult learning techniques to build skills for product managers from diverse backgrounds. Creating a logical and physical architecture that combines functional and physical elements typically starts with a functional system view based on system requirements. Beyond participation in the vehicles initial sale, OEMs need to cultivate a true life cycle experience with multiple car and noncar touchpoints per month. With enough industry data, however, the models can see how these sorts of changes affected productivity in the past and provide a good estimate of likely future effects. We offer client support throughout the entire global sourcing process by leveraging best-cost country (BCC) suppliers. Because established companies tend to move slowly and must invest resources in existing products, this means that unlike in the 20th century, attacking disruptors now have the advantage. This in turn will allow them to provide agile teams with high-level inputs and boundary conditions. An empowered product manager enables an organization to amplify its innovation efforts. Innovate better than the disrupters. Know Your Worth. The second use case involves data-driven development based on a state-of-the-art big-data architecture. Source2Pay (S2P) $50K Horizon 2 ideas extend a companys existing business model and core capabilities to new customers, markets, or targets. Instead, OEMs need to become more customer centered across the entire product development process, even to the point of launching a dedicated customer experience (CX) unit. The best new product development process includes portfolio management as a way to select new projects. Before development starts, the team examines CX insights and conducts mid- to long-term planning as it collects business and industry trends and user feedback. The results of this effort reinforced the value of identifying a product manager to guide the development team and experts through the process. The risk here is that the mismatch of culture, process, and incentives may strangle the newly acquired innovation culture. Delays, and the extra resources needed to counter them, mean higher costs too. 0 5 Want to comment? Spurred into action by the finding, the company took steps to reduce the complexity of its design and prioritize the scope of the effort, resulting in a project that met the customers minimum requirements and could be delivered on time. Agile product development relies on a dynamic model that ignites passion in people. That was the case for one former leader in the consumer-goods space that had lost 50 percent of its market share over the course of a decade-long slide. Find out how we work on site with clients to help them achieve long-term improvement and measurable, bottom-line results. Anna Herlt is a partner in McKinseys Munich office, where Martin Kellner and Paul Jana are associate partners, and Sebastian Kchler is a partner; and Henrik Rochlitz is an associate partner in the Berlin office. The acquisition, development, and retention of new software and system-engineering talent and capabilities will be core to success. Commercial change. Yet several trendssuch as the growing importance of data in decision making, an increased focus on consumers and design, and the evolution of product-development methodologiessuggest that much can be gained by considering how consumer-product managers can evolve. In our work with consumer-goods companies, we have identified a critical need for a product manager to connect these many stakeholderssomeone who is ultimately accountable for delivering consumer and business outcomes. This misalignment can result in products that miss the mark holistically. In addition, companies must continue to prioritize innovation even as the pandemic puts pressure on budgets. This development is strongly integrated and will affect automotive suppliers in the same way. McKinsey_Website_Accessibility@mckinsey.com. To estimate the correlation between each organizations KPIs and its overall financial performance, we created a new metric of our own, taking the companys profit growth for the year after its participation in the Fingerprint and subtracting the average profit growth for companies in its sector. OEMs must transform their approach to product development steering to focus on cost and revenue optimization over the entire vehicle life cycle as shown in Exhibit 3. Please try again later. It can be a complex challenge to refine a product concept and make the right adjustmentswhile balancing input from varying perspectiveswithout straying from the concepts core consumer-value proposition. Consequently, OEMs and suppliers need to shift their R&D processes and operating models from hardware engineering to a combination of software and tech-driven systems engineering. Planners tend to assume that the issues that befell their previous project would be cured and that no new issues would crop up. The overall results: time-to-market for the new products dropped by 40 to 60 percent, margins improved by 6 percent in the first six months after the sprint, and market share is on track to rise by 8 to 10 percent within the next two years. Orpheus elevates the focus of spend analytics to guide procurement strategy development and execution. They generally give excel exercise and logical reasoning problems to solve. Implementing big-data infrastructure and architecture is an essential requirement for driving data-enabled engineering and virtualization. Never miss an insight. The ability to relate credibly to all stakeholders, especially when passions are high, is extremely valuable. This success will shift the business model away from one-time sales and toward vehicle life cycle revenue streams and new forms of monetization, such as pay-per-use or subscription-based models. Please email us at: Making product development as digital as tomorrows products, Jeremy Hope and Robin Frasier, Who needs budgets?. That means shifting from the traditional use of scattered, embedded electronic-control units (ECUs) to a domain-focused system with central vehicle controllers. Executives will have to decide whether to develop in-house talent or hire to fill this need. In the 21st century the attackers have the advantage, as the incumbents are burdened with legacy. In the short term, companies looking to accelerate their profit growth are wise to focus on the classic metrics that most already use, such as volumes, revenues, unit costs, time to market and process discipline. Interviews are similar as the one for generalist positions, they both include the PEI, the fit and the Q&A parts. Steering toward the right ambition level. The product development team should derive targets by benchmarking development projectsand the benchmarks should reflect the true project intent.