10 Steps to Get from Concept to Launch

Here’s our 10-step outline. Note that there are literally hundreds of sub-actions to take along the way, and depending on the product or service you’re developing, some steps may be skipped or combined and the details may vary.
You may find some of the steps surprising, e.g., selling the product before finishing development, choosing to complete a business plan or perhaps not, and obtaining customer feedback before full product development.
1. Develop and draft the idea or concept
2. Produce prototypes or initial release(s) – several prototypes may be necessary to evaluate and find the best concept
3. Obtain customer feedback (to confirm the idea is worth pursuing and choose the best concept for further development)
4. Refine the product or service based on customer feedback and test the product under all conditions / use cases
5. Complete your business plan (if the business plan will help you – keep an eye out for our upcoming post on how to decide)
6. Fully document the product with drawings and specifications and establish a manufacturing plan
7. Ensure distribution and sales channels are in place and sell, sell, sell!
8. Finish product, process, and supply chain development
9. Produce the product
10. Ship the product / release the service
We’d love to chat and walk through the nuances of your particular situation. CAEDENCE can help you map your new product development, manage steps in the process, and prevent or overcome roadblocks as you turn your idea into reality.

Over the years we’ve been exposed to Six Sigma, Juran, Deming PDCA, 8D, Dale Carnegie, A3, Shainin, and more. Each technique works pretty well, and has been demonstrated many times in a wide variety of industries and circumstances. At the core they are all essentially the same!
Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
The differences between the paradigms resides in supplementary steps and toolkits. For example, 8D contains the important “In

Your primary role as a manager is to ensure your team’s success. Internalize this. Make sure your team members know this. Build an environment of trust and collaboration. A direct report of mine would frequently leave me out of the loop as problems escalated, preferring instead to “work harder”. It was clear that he felt uncomfortable delivering bad news to me (his boss) when things were not going according to plan. Let me tell you the rest of the story.