"SMART
PROTOTYPING"
Fast and Flexible?
Do It Wrong the First Time
by Preston Smith, New Product DynamicsComputers allow us to do many wonderful things today but, in many
cases, our thinking about how to use this tool wisely hasn’t caught up with rapid
advances being made in the technology. It’s like the horseless carriages of a century
ago: they still looked like, and were operated much like, horse-drawn carriages!
A similar thing could be said about prototyping, a
vital tool of product development. Prototyping has received more attention lately, in part
from Professor Stefan Thomke of Harvard Business School (See "Enlightened
Experimentation: The New Imperative for Innovation" in the February 2001 Harvard
Business Review). He and others are finding that the new prototyping tools available
today can only be exploited by rebuilding our product development process – and our
mindset – to take advantage of what modern prototyping can do.
For example, using modern computer technology, you can
"do it right the first time" by completing a great deal of design, analysis,
simulation, and checking of a new part on the computer. This means that the first time you
actually make the part, it is "right," at least in an engineering sense. As the
engineers are going down this route to perfection, however, the design is hidden from
customers, partners in the distribution channel, suppliers who will have to make it, and
even the test engineers who must design a test for it. Engineers – all of us,
actually – prefer this approach because it comfortably shields us from criticism of
our half-baked ideas.
What Thomke, et al., are discovering is that it is
actually faster, and more accurate, to do it wrong the first time. Get something
– almost anything – out there and let others react to it and tell you what is
wrong with it before you go down a path that won’t delight them. Expose your
ignorance, but do it quickly so that you can then move forward more surely. Furthermore,
this line of thinking suggests that you keep exposing your ignorance as you go,
continually drawing in others whom you will eventually have to satisfy.
Unfortunately, developers of computerized prototyping tools
are mostly pursuing other objectives. Rather than rapid, cheap prototypes that allow you
to expose your ignorance early, they are developing prototyping tools that will build an
elegant, expensive, "perfect" part later. There are some important exceptions to
this trend, but you will have to search to find them, and you will have to be clear about
what you’re seeking.
What is more difficult is that you and others in your
organization will have to think about product development and "failure" quite
differently in order to take advantage of modern prototyping capabilities. It is useful to
think of product development as a series of decisions or forks in the road. Prototypes and
experiments help you navigate these forks. The trick is to design the prototype or
experiment that gives you clear guidance at each fork so that you can get past it, and on
to the next one, quickly and accurately. Whereas, in the past, prototyping technology was
generally too expensive to make a prototype at every fork, today there are affordable
technologies that enable developers to do just this. The figure on this page illustrates
the difference between making a few elegant, expensive prototypes versus numerous
expendable ones.
Using this mode of operation, each prototype is aimed at
answering only one question, and it is only good enough to answer this question. When the
question is answered, you toss the prototype and move on the next one. To do this
effectively, you will also have to be sensitive to building consensus and commitment as
you go. If you have traveled a great distance in your journey, and an executive who
hasn’t been involved wants to revisit a much earlier fork in the road, you will have
lost much of the advantage of this approach to prototyping.
One warning. This "do it wrong" approach is
not the best method in all cases. For example, if you are designing a memory chip, the
requirements can be laid out objectively at the outset, without further customer
involvement, while the cost of making a mistake is very high. In such cases, it pays to
get it right the first time. However, most product development projects will benefit from
a more interactive approach, and cheap, quick prototypes are perfect for this.
This article originally appeared
in the May 2003 issue of PDBPR
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ABOUT
PRESTON SMITH