April 23, 1998

Time-to-market race is over

Michael C Markowitz, Editor in Chief

If you long ago eliminated the fat from your design cycle and have been sitting around laughing at everyone else struggling to get products out quickly, it's time again to put on your track shoes. The rules, which previously emphasized reducing cycle time, are about to change. 

There's good news for those of you exhausted from trying to sprint ahead of ever-shrinking design cycles: Design cycles are about to stop shrinking. Take a moment to catch your breath. But, if you long ago eliminated the fat from your design cycle and have been sitting around laughing at everyone else struggling to get products out quickly, it's time again to put on your track shoes. The rules, which previously emphasized reducing cycle time, are about to change.

Product design is a cyclic occupation. For the past 10 to 15 years, it has been fashionable to discuss improving "time to market," a catch phrase for the need to design and manufacture products quickly and get them into customers' hands. Lew Platt, HP's chairman, perhaps put it best when he called it "time to revenue." That fashion has created enormous secondary industries whose sole mission is increasing design productivity and efficiency. The bywords of this part of the cycle include "correct by construction," "first time right," and "concurrent engineering."

Here's a surprise: Better products--offering greater performance, increased utility, and more features--weren't the primary objective of this time-to-market, long-distance sprint. Such products were the consequence of companies' trying to keep ahead of their competition. The philosophy that dominated most companies often involved the following short-term thinking: "We have to be in the game. Once we're in, then we can think about designing better, faster, and smaller."

But from where most companies are today, time to market doesn't matter anymore. The reason for the shift is that companies can't move their products through to customers fast enough to make them pay off. For example, if you can design a new product in a day, but it takes a week to get it into customers' hands and a month to cover your development costs, chances are you aren't going to be designing an upgrade every day.

The new game will likely transfer the rules back to where you thought they always were: focused on performance and features. You'd better design a dynamite product that innovates and does more than what your customer wants today. Otherwise, your product will be a sitting target for the competition to aim at, and you won't be able to replace it for a short time. There's little room for error. On your mark, get set, go!

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