Eight Simple Steps for New Product Development

Eight Simple Steps for New Product Development takes an idea through screening, concept testing, design, trial and launch in a fixed order, so a product earns its way to market on evidence rather than on the loudest voice in the room.

Eight stops line up left to right, each one a hurdle an idea clears before reaching the shelf.

The eight-stage route from idea to commercialisation.

Reach for this when…

You keep launching products on a hunch and half of them flop in the first season.
Two people disagree about whether an idea is worth funding and there's no shared process to settle it.
You've skipped market testing before and got burned by it.

How to run it

Generate ideas from every source you've got - customers, competitors, your own team - before spending real money.
Screen them hard against your objectives, feasibility and finance, and let weak ideas die here rather than later.
Turn the survivors into a tested concept, not just a pitch, and get a real customer reaction to it.
Set the marketing strategy for how it'll reach the market.
Run the business analysis honestly - the sales, cost and profit case - including the case for killing it.
Design, build and test a real prototype before committing to production.
Test the market in a controlled trial before the full rollout.
Commercialise it: launch at full scale.

A worked example

Situation. Abdullah Al-Otaibi runs Otaibi Outdoor Furniture, a garden-furniture manufacturer in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where new ranges had always launched on the sales team's gut feel.

Applied. For a new folding-table range he ran the full eight steps for the first time, including the marketing strategy and market-testing stages the business had always skipped.

Result. The trial batch showed the mid-size table selling and the large one sitting in showrooms; he cut the large size before the full production run, saving a season's worth of dead stock.

Nowak Metalworks' trial run at the Market testing stage exposed the large table as a slow seller before full production.

The catch

The eight steps assume you can move sequentially, and real product decisions rarely wait that politely - competitors don't pause while you finish stage four. It also treats 'kill the idea' as a valid outcome of every gate, which only works if leadership will actually let a bad idea die.

If the person who champions the idea also runs the gate meant to kill it, the gate never closes.

Origin: Philip Kotler & Gary Armstrong (New Product Development process)

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