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  • 1.  PDMA Body of Knowledge and Top Life Cycle Management Tools

    Posted 05-31-2019 08:14
    "Life Cycle Management ensures that the ongoing value of the product is maximized in terms of its evolutionary improvement and long term sustainability."  ~ PDMA BoK Guidebook to Training and Certification, First Edition

    What are the most useful life cycle management tools used in product management and development and how have they evolved in a market place where life cycles are increasingly shorter for many industries?


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    Karen Dworaczyk
    VP Marketing PDMA Product Development and Manageme
    INSIGHTOVATION�
    Canandaigua NY
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  • 2.  RE: PDMA Body of Knowledge and Top Life Cycle Management Tools

    Posted 06-01-2019 12:27
    Edited by System 11-16-2020 17:29
    Karen,

    It's an interesting question and one I have often faced - in particular, when is a new emerging and often hyped technology going to supplant an existing one, and therefore how to manage an existing product in the mature stage of the product lifecycle? Is it better to continue to enhance and develop the existing one, or urgently plan for its replacement?  The substitution timeline has significant implications, depending on whether the timeline is one, five or ten years and often the rate of substitution is talked up by evangelists for the new technology.

    One framework I have found useful is from Adner and Kapoor (2016), who propose a framework for analysing the pace of technology adoption and substitution. They argue that new technology invariably needs an ecosystem to develop to achieve mass adoption, and the challenge for the emergence of the new ecosystem vs. the opportunity to usefully extend the old ecosystem determines the rate of substitution. So whatever space you are in, you can map this out and it leads to a position on the likely rate of substitution, informing your lifecycle management decisions.

    Here's a link to their HBR article from 2016: https://hbr.org/2016/11/right-tech-wrong-time

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    Brian Martin
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  • 3.  RE: PDMA Body of Knowledge and Top Life Cycle Management Tools

    Posted 06-04-2019 20:15
    Brian and Karen, great basis for a more in-depth discussion. We are currently updating PDMA's Body of Knowledge and one specific chapter that is receiving significant attention is the Product Life Cycle.  Version 1 of the BoK provided a fairly light treatment of management throughout the life cycle. I would really like to see more discussion on this topic to enrich our new version of the BoK.  Anyone with any suggestions or experience please "chip in".

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    Allan Anderson
    Emeritus Professor of Product Development
    Massey University
    Palmerston North
    New Zealand
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  • 4.  RE: PDMA Body of Knowledge and Top Life Cycle Management Tools

    Posted 06-25-2019 13:26
    This is a topic that is indeed worthy of greater attention as it contains the true secrets of growth through innovation.  There are a couple of really core works here I would recommend for review if you haven't yet read these.  One is by the original "godfather" of the S curve, Everett M> Rodgers book, Diffusion of Innovations, first published in 1995.  It is considered the seminal work in this space, and a must read for anyone interested in this topic.  Many of the concepts presented were popularized by Geoffrey Moore's book "Crossing the Chasm", another mandatory read (in my opinion).  A lot of this early work is just now becoming mainstream content in marketing texts.

    Over the course of the last couple of decades, the rapid changes observed in the tech industry have validated many aspects of these models, as well as mathematical models such as Fisher-Pry, which can be used to estimate market size and growth rates.  One of the general rule of thumb this model suggest is the time it takes to get to 1% market penetration is equal to the time it takes to get to 10%, which is then equal to the time it takes to get to 50%.  In other words, if it take 3 years to get to 1% penetration, it will take another 3 years to get to 10%, (6 years total to reach 10%), and then another 6 years to get to 50%.  (12 years total).  This timing and pass has a lot of influence on things such as true innovator, and fast follower strategies, and market entry timing.

    Dan Lewis

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    Daniel E. Lewis PhD, PE, PMP, NPDP
    President - Product Acuity Consulting
    www.productacuity.com
    The Woodlands, Texas
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  • 5.  RE: PDMA Body of Knowledge and Top Life Cycle Management Tools

    Posted 06-06-2019 08:19
    How true you are Brian!  I was at Ameritrade in the early 00's and we started an adjacent effort focused on financial aggregation services.  We built essentially mint.com in 01/02 but of course, it didn't go anywhere because we didn't have (a) the technological infrastructure or, and more important in this example, (b) the market comfort with online financial transactions.

    Of course, now, we have both and traditional payments networks like Visa/MC and AMEX along with traditional banking platforms are being disrupted.  In 2016, according to ARK Invest, China represented 94% of the $620.5bn of online transactions with a vast majority of those transactions happening via Alipay or WeChat Pay.  

    Thanks for sharing the article Brian - I've added it to my library of "Good Reads" :)

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    Ernie Harris
    Founder
    Interesting Blazer
    St Petersburg FL
    727-306-1880
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  • 6.  RE: PDMA Body of Knowledge and Top Life Cycle Management Tools

    Posted 06-06-2019 16:14
    Interesting, Ernie, and so common, a great concept before its time. The challenge also for industry incumbents is not to become the slowly boiled frog - and avoid falling foul of the Innovator's DIlemma

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    Brian Martin
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  • 7.  RE: PDMA Body of Knowledge and Top Life Cycle Management Tools

    Posted 09-24-2019 10:09
    Brian

    Thanks for sharing the HBR article - a great reminder and useful framework for assessing competitive threat and effective response in times of great change.

    Meredith​

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    Meredith Baratz
    Vice President
    UnitedHealthcare
    San Diego CA
    8586588658
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  • 8.  RE: PDMA Body of Knowledge and Top Life Cycle Management Tools

    Posted 09-24-2019 12:45

    First, great article regarding ecosystems.

     

    While there are numerous challenges regarding timing estimates of a new disruptive technology, there are some tried and true models.  One very generalize rule of thumb is the time it takes to get to 1% market penetration, is equal to the time it will take to get to 10% market penetration, which is then equal to the time it will take to get to 50% market penetration.  So if it takes 3 years to get to 1%, it will take another 3 to get to 10%, (total of 6 years to 10%), and then it will take another 6 years to get to 50%.  These rough estimates that align with the S-model and are also supported by the mathematical prediction models such as Bass, and Fisher-Pry.

     

    The ecosystem is an example of one of the fundamentals that drive the rate of adoption which is compatibility with what currently exists.  However, compatibility also includes behaviors, values, belief, knowledge, infrastructure (a.k.a. ecosystem), business models, etc.   Complex systems change slowly, so the more aligned an offering is with what currently exists, the faster the rate of adoption will be.  This is also why true "disruption" is a market phenomenon and not just the work of a single company or product.  

     

    Bottom line is the key to pushing a disruptive innovation is planning the transition path from the current state to the future state.  The greater the gap, the bigger the change, and the slower the diffusion will be.  This is why one of the things I look at with clients that have an innovative product that stalls at market launch is what type of changes and modifications can be made to provide an "on-ramp" by making it more compatible with what currently exists.   

     

    For more background on the topics, I recommended the seminal work "Diffusion of Innovations" by Everett Rodgers.  He does a great job in laying out the dynamics that impact adoption rates, and the series of books written by Geoffrey Moore (i.e. Crossing the Chasm, etc) which ties stages of adoption to marketing activities.  One of the things Moore points out in his work is the need to directly offer certain related services in the early days of a product, that you will know you will eventually move to channel partners as the market matures.    

     

    Dan Lewis

     

    "If I see further than others, it is only because I stand on the shoulders of giants." – Issac Newton

     

    Daniel E. Lewis, PhD, PE, PMP, NPDP

    President – Product Acuity Consulting

    dlewis@productacuity.com

    281.734.8920 (m)

    Skype: dlewintx

     

    www.productacuity.com

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     






  • 9.  RE: PDMA Body of Knowledge and Top Life Cycle Management Tools

    Posted 09-25-2019 13:38
    Great commentary and I am going to share it with my colleagues that teach in the Hamline University Innovation Program. Many of them are former 3Mers who are Corporate Scientists.

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    Creative regards,
     
    Kim