Yes. And no. It’s complicated.
In an ideal world, with time, money, and staff, we’d work through each step in sequence for every new product or feature. We’d work through Proof of Concept, Concept Validation, Design Validation, and Production validation before we sell anything.
But we don’t live in an ideal world, do we?
In the real world, where we work with limited budgets and schedules, we’re often pressured to skip steps in the process, to sell sooner, produce faster, etc.
We can do this, of course, but to be successful, we need to start with an understanding of the “right” way to do things. From that foundation, we can make educated choices to combine phases, skip low-risk testing, etc.
We run into trouble when we blindly compress schedules, without taking into account the risks of each step we’re eliminating.
Have you ever taken a shortcut in your product development process? How did it turn out?
-Brian Schoolcraft
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