This article has been prompted by many of our customers asking for a ‘magic bullet’ which will easily establish a new product development (NPD) process or framework for their business.

In our opinion the process (irrespective of how good and detailed it is) is just a start. The real challenge is getting the company and all the business units to adhere to the process and follow it. But that is a topic for another post.

So for this discussion here is a fairly good new product development (NPD) process outline including some of the key deliverables for each step and milestone. In the next article we will provide all the documentation required for each of the steps in the process.

To make it easier to get you going with your new product development efforts, you can re-use our product development task list and project schedule.

Below task list is a table created in Microsoft Excel and covers all the key tasks you will be required to complete in your project across all the phases from market analysis to product launch. Please note this is mainly applicable to telecom projects but can be also adapted to other industries with some modifications.

Sample new product development (NPD) process (task list)

For a better view, you can also use project management planning tools such as Gant Charts.

New Product Development (NPD) Process Gantt Chart 

Web-based and interactive versions of above process are available in our ParcusFlow product management software platform.