Launching a Product - Does it take a lot to Manage Developing a New Product?

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman. I'm CEO and founder of Peterman Design Firm. And on today's episode, I'm going to answer the question, does it take a lot to manage developing a new product? And of course, this is a yes and no. And sometimes kind of question, but there's a few things that go into determining, you know, what is it going to take to manage developing a new product? That's something that we look at. It helps determine, you know, whether we have one person managing it or whether we have a dedicated project manager on a project and what that structure looks like in order to make sure that we're managing a new product development process and project properly, which is really important because if you mismanage it, it doesn't matter how good things are, it can become very painful if not managed properly. So the areas that I want to talk about are project budget and size, expertise needed, the inputs, edits, revisions that are going to occur through the project, a number of agencies or team members that are involved in accomplishing the project, and the type of project. So first we're going to talk about project budget and size. On projects that are lower budget, that have a very limited amount of resources, managing that process can actually be more difficult because it's a lot of intensive resource management. And so when you're really focused on managing resources, you have to put a lot of effort and thought into how to make the absolute most for every dollar spent. And, you know, it's definitely doable. There's people that are really good at that, but that takes a lot more focus and work actually than some of the bigger projects. And so in this startup world, that is how you typically work. You run a very tight budget. You are focused on making sure nothing goes over budget as often as you can. And so that takes a lot of work and there's a lot of time and effort that goes into it. Now, that being said, if the budget is excessive, then you have to really watch still that there's no bloat. So bloat is very easy to get into a project and you want to avoid that. And so either end of the spectrum can actually cause additional strain on the management side of a project. Whereas a properly budgeted project can be a lot easier because you have room to breathe. You're not so tight on capital that you need to be hyper-focused on, do I have enough money? Are we able to do that? Can we afford that? Is it going to work financially? And you don't have so much money that people that are working on the project feel like they can just Oh, we're going to spend extra on this and not really pay attention. So that balance can be really good at minimizing the amount of project management work. And that's why budgeting a project is really important. For project size, you're definitely going to have more complicated, larger projects that involve more management. Smaller projects typically take less management time in order to develop a new project. Next area I want to talk about is expertise needed. So if it's a really simple project, you only need a few people or a few different expertise involved, then you're going to end up managing a lot less people, a lot, a lot less going on. And so it's going to take a lot less management time in order to do that. The more expertise you need, the more experts you need involved and on team, you're going to have to do more work in terms of finding that expertise or bringing it on board, managing it. And so that will help determine what the project management is going to look like for new product development. Next area I want to talk about is input, edits, revisions, things like that. So on a project that is shorter duration or has less revisions and inputs, then you're going to have a lot less management. If there's fewer stakeholders, if there's fewer people involved in the project in terms of decision-making, then there's going to be less edits, there's going to be less inputs, there's going to be less revisions. And so in those, you need less management. It's going to be easier to take care of the management side of things. Whereas if you have a lot, you know, say you have 15 stakeholders and they all have input power, they all are needed to be involved in the project, then you're gonna go through a different process. It's gonna take longer. There's gonna be more negotiation or more conversation around decisions. And so it's gonna take longer. There's gonna be, your project manager may end up spending more hours in meetings just to make sure everything is moving forward, and it's going to create additional revisions. And so additional revisions means ensuring those revisions are done correctly, and so your management end of the project and budget is going to definitely increase. It's going to be harder, take more time to do. Next area I want to talk about is number of agencies and team. Now this is partly tied to the expertise needed, but it's also tied to the size. So maybe you only need a few different people involved in terms of expertise, but the amount of work that is being done or the timeframe. So if you have a shorter timeframe, meaning you need to get more work done in the same number of weeks, then you're going to have a larger amount of people. So your team is going to be larger. You may have multiple agencies involved in a project as well. And so bringing all of those, increasing that load, you may end up needing additional project managers just to be able to handle it because you are compressing a lot of work into a shorter amount of time. And it's gonna be harder for one person to be able to just manage all of it or even teams to individually manage themselves and work through it. So being aware of the size complexity of the project will also inform, you know, how many agencies are needed, how big of a team, and that will impact, you know, definitely how much management needs to be put in. The last thing I want to talk about is type of project. So the type of project will really make a difference because you look at different areas that are needed in a project. So if one project you have there's just a design project, you're going to be limited to one phase of the project. And, you know, you can be fairly limited in that scope. Whereas if you're looking at, you know, managing everything from your concept through engineering, design, manufacturing, marketing, you know, that level of management in that type of project where it's an all-inclusive project, then your management is going to be a lot bigger. We talked about project budget and size, expertise needed, the inputs and edits and revisions involved, number of agencies and team members, and types of projects. And each of those factors go into determining, you know, what is a lot and what is a little amount of managing that is required to successfully develop a new product. Hopefully that answers the question. Does it take a lot to manage developing a new product? And the short answer is it does sometimes, and it does not other times. Hey, thanks for watching. We really appreciate our viewers, and if you haven't subscribed yet, please do subscribe to our channel so you can get more great videos like this in your feed, and like the video. If you wanna learn more about the Peterman Design Firm, please check us out on our website, petermanfirm.com. You'll find link and information in the description. And of course, we're on all social media as well, so check us out there. All right, thank you. Thank you.