Paul O’Connor is an expert in the field of New Product Development. For over twenty-five years he has worked with executives and facilitated teams of senior managers. In 1984, Paul founded The Adept Group Limited, Inc.
Capitalizing on his skills in business strategy, marketing research, technology assessment, organizational process and team facilitation, Mr. O’Connor influences and guides the product development and innovation efforts of clients in both consumer and industrial markets, around the globe. Read More
Winning the Red Queen’s Race in New Product Development “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” – Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass Does product development seem […]
But Smart Strategy Drives Speed and Agility. “Agile execution beats strategy.” It sounds good, but is it true? It is if you believe strategies are fixed and unresponsive to change. But it’s not true if you create the right strategy made responsive to new situations. The biggest problem with strategies is that they don’t stand […]
Uniting Agile, Strategy, and Jobs-to-be-Done There’s a tug-a-war going on across three interrelated topics. Each drives superb product development. Yet the three topics act independently. The Approaches The Agile approach is found in every corner of product development. Its first mission was to uncover a new way to develop software successfully. But following its success, […]
The Need for Responsive Roadmapping Agile implementations have a big problem. When they bump up against an organization’s culture, progress can stop. It turns out, behaviors and practices can be a brick wall. To me, it’s humorous to hear experts say Agile’s full benefits accrue only from “transformative implementations.” They declare an organization, from top […]
Where is Roadmapping Taking Us? Roadmapping has been on quite a journey. Many managers use the term to describe planning and tracking projects. But they use different schemes to create roadmaps. And the results vary widely. There’s much to learn from roadmapping’s evolution. This is especially true for innovation management and product development in big […]
Interested in Product Line Strategy and Roadmaps? Can you name a successful company without a powerful product line? What about a company that failed because a product line died? It’s easy to see the impact product lines have on business health. The problem is that good product line strategy gets lost in the culture of […]
Go Beyond Single Product Innovation Look over a few articles on innovation. Are they about innovating one product at a time or whole product lines? This is important because a product line has far more impact in business than does a single product. It’s time to think much bigger. It’s time to push full product […]
I have a simple message for managers who oversee product development portfolios. Portfolio Balance is Misguided. The problem is no one knows what the balance must be. Instead, we make it up. That’s right, the gurus and experts make up numbers to impress you. Portfolio balance is BS. It would seem portfolio balance should guide […]
New Words and Business Knowledge Decades ago, most MBA curriculum followed the Harvard Business School approach. Each had a capstone course called Policy, taught in the classic Socratic method. Good professors fed students cases and then used leading questions to set up deep discussions. For many students like me, the discussions taught more than we’d […]
The Missing Linchpin to Product Line Strategy Most managers and executives know fast product development helps successful outcomes. There are two reasons for the push for speed. First, fast development is more efficient and less costly. And second, the sooner you launch a product, the better your competitive position. While there’s not a 100% correlation […]
