New Product Development (NPD)
A strategic product built to centralize and automate the entire global NPD process for a leading US beverage brand, replacing fragile manual tracking with a robust digital platform.
The primary product objective was to address critical inefficiencies within the client’s existing, decentralized New Product Development (NPD) process.
The solution targeted cross-functional NPD teams across R&D, Marketing, and Operations (Target Users) by replacing their error-prone, manually tracked Master Excel Sheets with a centralized, web-based platform. This provided an automated system for tracking complex interdependencies and managing milestones (Value Proposition).
The core measurable outcome was to accelerate Go-to-Market (GTM) timelines, provide executive-level visibility and transparency, and increase the organization's capacity for innovation by avoiding task duplication and generating reliable reporting metrics.
Go-to-Market Efficiency: Increased NPD project on-time completion by over 33% from the previous manual process.
Operational Reliability: Achieved a consistent rate of over 80% for NPD projects managed efficiently and completed on-time.
Capacity Increase: Increased the number of NPD projects handled by the same team size by 20%.
User Adoption: Achieved a voluntary user adoption rate of 90% within the first month of the initial functional release.
This initiative was launched as a strategic account expansion, building on the success of the earlier Artwork Management project. The challenge centered on multiple global teams managing massive, interdependent NPD programs using highly complex, formula-heavy Master Excel sheets, which severely hindered governance and management visibility, leading to missed launch deadlines.
Using a customer-centric design thinking approach, we began by collaboratively documenting the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) and mapping pain points across the entire cross-functional user journey. We validated technical viability with a rapid Proof-of-Concept (PoC) and utilized user feedback to refine initial requirements.
Following the Agile development process, we translated user needs into Epics and features, defined the information architecture, and created a prioritized, two-year product roadmap spanning six phases. By focusing on business criticality and implementing rigorous governance checkpoints, we successfully rolled out each functional module incrementally, shifting the organization from manual tracking to a real-time, automated NPD command center.
Workflow Automation: Successfully automated complex calculations, dependency tracking, and cross-functional handoffs that were previously managed manually via fragile Excel formulas.
Information Architecture (IA): Designed a robust IA and interaction model capable of handling the entire, global NPD program portfolio, providing both granular task tracking for teams and high-level progress visibility for management.
Phased Deployment: Managed and delivered the system across six prioritized release phases over a two-year period, ensuring continuous value delivery and mitigating deployment risk for critical business functions.
The initial challenge was overcoming user inertia and resistance to migrating from their familiar Excel environment to the new web application. We countered this by prioritizing immediate, user-requested UI/UX tweaks after the initial release, which directly addressed usability concerns and proved instrumental in driving mass user adoption quickly.