PRODUCT-BUSINESS PERSPECTIVE: Faster Development Cannot Fix the Wrong Product Decision

Reuters reports that Honda is rethinking its approach to India after its passenger-vehicle market share fell from 7.3% to 1.3%.

The response includes more local development, greater use of Indian suppliers, a target of roughly 20% lower costs, and an effort to cut vehicle-development time approximately in half. Reuters reports that Honda's traditional approach of adapting global vehicles for India contributed to products that were expensive and not sufficiently matched to the market. Reuters

There is an important product-business lesson here.

Development speed matters. But speed cannot rescue the wrong product decision.

Companies often talk about entering a “market” as though the market itself were the customer.

It isn't.

You sell to people, not markets.

Those people have particular problems, priorities, alternatives, economic constraints and reasons for choosing one product over another.

If those aren't understood early enough, the organization can execute extremely well against assumptions that were wrong from the beginning.

Then the symptoms appear downstream:

• Engineering takes too long.

• Costs are too high.

• The feature set misses.

• Suppliers become a problem.

• Pricing doesn't work.
  

Those look like execution problems.

Sometimes they are.

But many product execution problems are created before execution begins.

The management implication is not to choose between customer understanding and faster development. You need both—in the right order.

Before asking “How can we develop this faster?”, product leaders should first ask:

“Are we sufficiently certain we're developing the right thing for the right customer?”