About TCP | Previous Issue | Next Issue | Subscribe/Unsubscribe | Issue Archive

A Space-Time Theory of Time-to-Market

Have you ever wondered why many vacations seem unfulfilling? My idea of a perfect vacation is one where I can pause the universe’s passing of time while moving forward on a separate “vacation clock” and then, upon return, resume life from where I left off.

One of the biggest problems with vacation is that while you are gone, your actual life continues with no regard to your need for time off. Bills still need to be paid, world events continue to occur, and all of your projects at work compile until your return. Many people who scramble for email access while on holiday often do so just to keep the inbox load level under control.

If we could somehow control space-time and change its linear nature, maybe I could make my dream vacation a reality, but for now, it’s just a pipe-dream.

Product development projects run along their own “space-time,” a group of dimensions that combine a linear path of physical and temporal phenomena. There are often times within a project where we wish we had the ability to pause one part and proceed on the other, just like my vacation fantasy, but are limited by the fact that many things are interconnected like contestants in a three-legged race at a father-son picnic.

One way to divide the space-time of development projects is by its physical development and its conceptual development. Physical development tasks are the “spatial” dimensions that can be measured, and are composed of the engineering and manufacturing of the physical parts and materials that make up the product. The conceptual development is the “time” dimension composed of things that are immeasurable, and represents the ideas behind the product, who it’s for, what it does, requirement specifications, how it will be differentiated in the market, creative work and other concepts. Connect these dimensions as a linear path towards a product launch and together you can say that the space-time cycle of idea to implementation represents “time-to-market.”

What this otherwise useless intellectual exercise allows us to do is view product development from an alternative deconstructive perspective to try and expose areas that can help us accomplish project goals and shorten cycle time.

The “critical path” (from which this newsletter draws its moniker) is another term that can be used to represent the entire project as a combination of interdependent events. Many product development experts advise that such things as new technology development be removed from the critical path to prevent the new technology’s slower developmental timeline from interfering with the overall project’s schedule. This could be called “concurrent engineering” or “parallel processing,” but is also a method for altering the space-time of a project.

If you really want to take this analogy further, you can say that everything within a project, tasks, decisions, CAD procedures, testing, etc., all emit strong or weak forces upon the project. They each have a level of “gravity” that can push or pull on one another, thus affecting each other’s path in project space-time. Some management decisions definitely bend space or create dips that pull the project in a particular direction, just as massive heavenly bodies do to the fabric of the universe.

For example, let’s say you are trying to determine what type of material to use for the casing of a piece of your product. You know that one senior manager has a strong bias towards a particular type of polycarbonate plastic, so the strength of his gravitational force will pull this decision towards a particular materials path that will dictate that portion of the project space-time.

Many times such management decisions could be called “singularities,” which in physics is defined as “a point in space-time at which gravitational forces cause matter to have infinite density and infinitesimal volume, and space and time to become infinitely distorted.” It’s best to minimize project singularities where possible. If you have more than one singularity appear in your development system, whether it be scope-creep or an engineering change order, you can easily see how their gravitational force can affect time-to-market.

Suffice it to say that every product development project creates its own big bang, and is like a universe unto itself. But unlike the cosmic universe, every project universe is encapsulated, bound within a sphere that has a definable beginning and definite finish (at least we hope so). And like my vacation example, most projects seem to march forward on a timeline that lives outside of, but is always connected to, other universes. If only we could exit time to work on the project and re-enter the timeline once it was complete. If only.

In the past, readers have remarked to me that using the metaphors of the science of physics to describe the product development process is helpful; others have called it “useless pedantry.” Regardless of where you fall in this spectrum of opinion on this article, the time you’ve spent reading it, you can’t have back. The same goes for all of your projects. Damn you, Einstein!

Any reaction to this article? Send your feedback to gregg@roundtable.com

---

Link: http://www.strangenewproducts.com/

Recently we’ve pointed you to gadget ‘blog’ sites like Gizmodo and Engadget that provide daily reports on both cool and weird, mostly high-tech devices, from both mainstream sources and stuff that seemingly originates from under one of the world’s many rocks.

In this issue, we follow this same road, but take a jaunt down some side streets to a website focused less on the gadgets and more on the weird. By the site’s own admission, the Strange New Products website “is about stuff that is totally revolutionary, really weird, corny, ingenious, or completely useless.” If you suspect this describes things in your company’s product portfolio, you might want to visit.

This site reminds us highly of the work of Robert McMath, a “new products” guru who boasts a collection of over 80,000 consumer goods, mostly market failures. Truly, McMath’s favorites like “garlic cake” and “monster repellent spray” would fit right in on Strange New Products. Some of their recent entries include:

• Papermate Antibacterial Pen

• Claw Caps for Cats

• Adult Dinner Bibs

• Breathalyzer Car Ignition Locks

Additional Links:
Gizmodo - http://www.gizmodo.com
Engadget - http://www.engadget.com
Robert McMath's Website - http://www.newproductworks.com