Santa Clara University

Sample Custom Curriculum

Sample Custom Program: Leading Product Development
Course can be designed to fit your organization’s needs
Duration: 1 to 3 days possible

Day One

1. Importance of product development to the enterprise
   

2. a. Tracey/Wiersma three types of competencies – product leadership
   b. Value chains and value add through innovation – getting away from sedimentation and declining margins
   c. Examples of enterprises reinventing themselves through product and service innovation
   d. Disruptive innovation – Clayton Christiansen
   e. Examples of innovative products and organizations
   f. Success and failure rates of most new product development efforts

2. Product development is a multidisciplinary activity

a. Product Development ≠ Engineering
b. Requires the coordination of nearly all functions within the enterprise; the sooner you think of it as a business process rather than a function, the better you'll be
c. These functions have different cultures (Edgar Schein article), languages, reward systems, etc., creating conflict
d. The successful management of this conflict to produce a better result is key to product development
e. Understand your biases – personality profile

3. Organizing product development

1. a. Different project models; functional vs. project organization; matrix
   b. Core and extended teams
   c. Program management – business function, not engineering function; developing skill base
   d. Funding models – program vs. functional

Day Two

4. Structuring product development activity

a. Phase gate process and variants
b. Phase reviews and PACs
c. Software development methodologies
d. Risk management methodologies
e. Managing by boundary conditions
f. Making tradeoff decisions – Reinertson economic models
g. Team incentives and rewards; team charters
h. Metrics

Day Three

5. Managing the multi-product environment

a. Getting to a balanced portfolio; project selection approaches
b. Resource management
c. Pipeline management
d. Coordinating interdependent projects
e. Technology development and integration
f. Information systems for product development 

6. Case study – Le Petit Chef

7. Improving product development within your own enterprise – implementation strategies

a. Gathering data
b. Executive steering committee
c. Start at project level; move to multi-project level
d. Capability Maturity Model; PRTM Stage 0-4 model