Keeping Your Eye on the Ball:
A Product Development Perspective

Tiger Woods does it. So did Mickey Mantle and Michael Jordan. What these sports champions learned is that to be truly successful required a singular, unrelenting focus to keep their eyes on the ball. This practice enabled these individuals to reach the highest levels of performance and made them champions in their respective fields. The same can be said for those companies and individuals striving to achieve stellar performance from their product development process. Analogous to sports, in order to achieve this high level of performance for product development, we must first understand what “the ball” is.

The Factory Connection

To answer this, let’s begin by first examining a factory. In a factory, all activities are, ultimately, focused on the creation of the product. For a factory to be truly efficient, activities that minimize non-value-added tasks, quality defects, and WIP (work-in-process) levels will enable the factory achieve maximum performance from its manufacturing process. In other words, for the factory to achieve this high level of performance, it must keep its eyes on the product – and the activities that support it.

In the manufacturing arena, this concept is a pretty straightforward proposition. A product is a physical entity that can be seen and tracked. Consequently, it is easy, for example, to identify non-value-added activities such as the transportation of the product from one machine to the next, or high levels of WIP scattered across the factory floor.

Given this explanation, we can now make a correlation between the factory and product development. Whereas the key deliverable for the factory is the product, the key deliverable for product development is the product definition. To clarify, the product definition is represented by product data, information, and graphics that define the product, and is delivered by the product development process in the form of a drawing package that embodies this information. Therefore, for a company looking to achieve top-level performance from its product development efforts, it must focus on activities dealing with managing the product data, company knowledge, and even employee expertise, that goes into the creation of innovative product designs. This is “the ball” for product development. It is the ability to effectively manage these elements, known as knowledge management, that enables a select group of companies achieve this top level of performance.

Knowledge Management

Many people think that knowledge management is another way to refer to data repositories and file management systems. This is not the case. Knowledge management is an environment consisting of processes, people behaviors, and tools that enable individuals to access the right information, at a time when it is needed, in order to make the right business decisions. For product development, this means capturing, storing, and organizing product data and technical information, as well as the knowledge and experiences of employees in the organization. Using this information effectively and efficiently, and linking it with the creative ideas of product development engineers, is the basis for producing innovative products that will make a company truly successful.

Let’s explore the topic of knowledge management more closely by explaining how we define “knowledge.” Knowledge, in itself, can be represented as two different types: explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge represents data that can be communicated, documented, and stored in computer systems. It represents data possessing characteristics of being factual, discrete, and which, can be articulated and transferred. Examples include manuals, books, procedures, videos, presentations, and pictures, to name a few.

Tacit knowledge, on the other hand, is knowledge that resides in the people’s minds. It is the expertise, judgment, skills, experience, tribal knowledge, awareness, and wisdom that each person possesses. Tacit knowledge is acquired through practice, is prone to subjective insights and emotion, and is inseparable from individuals.

For example, let’s assume you wanted to become a great golfer. A logical approach would be to gather as much information as you can regarding the proper technique for swinging a golf club. You could read books on the topic, watch video tapes, and even attend golf clinics. In other words, the explicit knowledge to learn how to become a great golfer is readily available to virtually anyone. Would scrutinizing this material, even to the point where you could recognize a perfectly executed golf swing, make you a great golfer? The answer, obviously, is a resounding no.

Becoming a great golfer requires, for most people, many, many hours of practice. It means repeating the golf swing over and over again, and making corrections as needed. It requires an understanding of the characteristics of the golf course itself: tall versus short grass, firm versus soft greens, wind conditions, and many others. This knowledge, the tacit knowledge, is gained only through the first-hand experience of playing and practicing golf. In summary, it is the combination of explicit and tacit knowledge, together, that is the recipe for producing a great golfer.

Like golf, the same approach utilizing explicit and tacit knowledge can be applied to a practitioner working in the product development arena. Access to product data, existing designs, drawings, technical reports, and so on, represented as explicit knowledge, are key ingredients to support product development. But it is the marriage and application of this data with a practitioner’s experience, creativity, and insight that produces new and innovative designs. Companies that recognize the power in this combination: maximizing the efficiency in managing explicit knowledge, and providing an environment that fosters human collaboration and creativity, are the ones that are truly successful.