Redefining New Product Development

OLD BUSINESS. NEW TRICKS.

You don’t get to the top by resting on your laurels. Especially with competitors always nipping at your heels. So even in one of the oldest businesses around, “new” is still a great way to drive growth. That’s how we came to work with one of the largest banks in the world.

Our client deftly helped more than 100 million customers worldwide make their money work harder. But faced with ever-increasing competition, their marketing team needed to work smarter. The group lacked a set course when it came to managing the development of new financial products.

How do you design a path to make sure that your “new” is better than the other guy’s? In an industry full of bulls and bears, we went straight to the horse’s mouth.

We kicked things off by talking with the bank’s New Product Development team, finding out how they worked, discovering room for improvement and, more than anything, listening. The team knew from experience what worked best; we just needed to refine that knowledge into a useable form.

We took what we heard and came up with a new approach for designing new products, one that included a formal development process and a set of tools to help the team track progress from concept through market testing. Designing a fresh approach, however, was only half the battle.

Convincing employees to take on a new process was no easy task. That’s why the new product development process was built with ideas that came directly from their team. We used their input to shape the path. So when it came time to adopt a totally new way of doing things, the idea seemed more familiar and less daunting.

Successful? The bank implemented ACME’s new process across the board and retroactively on projects already in motion. Who says you can’t teach an old process some new tricks?