The History of New Product Development in Eleven Books
(Back in September, I wrote an article on Linkedin that was the most widely read of anything I’ve ever posted. The full article is below and I also added a quick summary of each book and why it made the list.)
Introduction
For most of my professional career, I’ve been involved new product development in one way or another and I always sought out professional development and training courses to improve my skills. Today, I advise companies who want to develop new products through my Product Opportunity Mapping framework.
My personal product journey started as a business school grad in the late 1980s and, in that pre-Internet era, very little content was available for anyone interested in the new product development process. The solution was the library and the book store, to read as much as possible and then implement what you learned in real world projects.
I kept reading and implementing and looking back over the past 30+ years, several books stood the test of time. One of the first ones I remember reading was Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore. It was published in 1991 and I still refer to it to this day. More recently, Sell More Faster (by Amos Schwartzfarb of Techstars for which I am a Mentor) is a very practical read and will also stand the test of time.
I’ve put together a Top Eleven Book List (plus a few honorable mentions) – arranged chronologically – which, to me, represent the history of modern new product development.
If you are in product development space or involved in a startup, they are all worthwhile reading. They offer practical frameworks, best practices and useful tips – many of which I have integrated (with credit) into Product Opportunity Mapping.
Collectively, these books also illustrate how the new product development process has evolved over the years and no doubt will set the stage for how the field will advance in the future.
This is not a comprehensive list so please provide your comments on the books that have influenced your product journey.
Top 11 Books - listed chronologically and more detailed descriptions are below:
Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers (1991) - Geoffrey Moore
The Art of the Long View (1991) - Peter Schwartz
The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (1997) - Clayton Christensen
Winning at New Products (2001) - Robert Cooper
The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win (2003) - Steve Blank
Jobs to be Done: Theory to Practice (2016) - Tony Ulwick
The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (2011) - Eric Ries
Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters (2011) - Richard Rumelt
The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback (2015) - Dan Olsen
Monetizing Innovation: How Smart Companies Design the Product Around the Price (2016) - Madhavan Ramanujan & Georg Tacke
Sell More Faster: The Ultimate Sales Playbook for Startups (Techstars; 2019) - Amos Schwartzfarb
Honorable Mentions:
Strategyzer Series: Value Proposition Design & Testing Business Ideas (2019) – David Bland & Alexander Osterwalder
Mapping Innovation: A Playbook for Navigating a Disruptive Age (2017) - Greg Satell
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers (2014) - Ben Horowitz
Quick Summaries & Why The Book Made the List
1. Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey Moore (1991)
Quick Summary:
Crossing the Chasm explores the challenges faced by technology companies trying to achieve mainstream adoption of their products. The "chasm" refers to the gap between early adopters of new technology and the larger market of more conservative, mainstream consumers. Moore argues that successful technology companies must understand the differences between these two groups and develop strategies to "cross the chasm" to reach the mainstream market. The book provides insights into the marketing and positioning strategies necessary to successfully market and sell new technology products to the mainstream market.
Why This Book Made the List:
I regularly chair panel discussions with entrepreneurs and often ask for a book recommendation for the audience. Crossing the Chasm has been the most referred to title even though it was published over 30 years ago.
The title is not as familiar to a younger generation but the concepts are timeless. The book has two key insights that directly influenced the design of the Product Opportunity Mapping framework.
First, Moore talks about the technology product adoption curve with the front end being early adopter purchasers. In the middle are mass market purchasers and then the laggards at the tail end. The “chasm” that Moore refers to is the gap between the early adopters and the mass market and his key insight was that early adopter product purchasers are not the same as the mass market purchasers. Further, having success selling to early adopters may not translate to mass market buyers and you have to sell differently to each group. In the worst case scenario, your product might only appeal to early adopters and not the mass market. As the size of the early adopter market is not that big, your product may be doomed (hence the reason the “chasm” between the two is sometimes called the “valley of death”).
Second, Moore came up with the “elevator pitch” concept which is how to articulate your product idea in the time it takes to ride an elevator in an office tower. The Winston Churchill quote comes to mind: “I wrote you a long letter and if I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter". It’s easier to talk at length about your new product idea but hard to get to its essence in a few short minutes.
My Product Opportunity Summary template is modelled after Moore’s elevator pitch and nailing it is an incredibly important tool for thinking through and focusing on the fundamentals of your product idea and how to communicate it to others.
2. The Art of the Long View by Peter Schwartz (1991)
Quick Summary:
The Art of the Long View by Peter Schwartz is a book about scenario planning and strategic decision making. It focuses on the importance of considering multiple possible futures to prepare for and adapt to change. The book discusses the process of creating scenarios and how to use them to inform business strategy and also covers the role of imagination, creativity, and strategic foresight in shaping the future. The overarching message is that by developing a long-term perspective and considering various scenarios, organizations can make better decisions and become more resilient to change.
Why This Book Made the List:
The Art of the Long View is not a product development book per se but I refer to it regularly when working with clients. Schwartz digs deeply into scenario planning when the future is unsure and outlines how to make decisions that have long-term implications – this is not unlike what happens when launching a new product.
With both scenario planning and new product development, predictions are being made about the future and, when lacking a crystal ball, it is an inherently difficult process.
The key point of the book is to not come up with least likely, likely, or most likely scenarios and then choosing one but instead come up with a handful of plausible scenarios and track and monitor them all over time. As you gather more and more information, shift your attention and resources towards the ones that look more promising and park the ones that do not.
When coming up with new product ideas, the process is similar. After brainstorming a bunch of ideas, you don’t want to narrow in and bet just on one as research shows that most new products fail. Instead build an ongoing pipeline of many opportunities. Like in the Art of the Long View, you want to manage products as a portfolio of investments, iterate development over time and proactively shift resources to the ones that look like winners.
Quick Summary:
The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen is about the challenges faced by established companies when dealing with disruptive technologies. Christensen writes that successful companies can become vulnerable to failure when they ignore new technologies that have the potential to fundamentally change their industry. He uses case studies to show that these companies often struggle to adapt because they are too focused on their current business model and are unable to embrace new and disruptive technologies. He highlights the importance of being open to change and innovation for companies to stay competitive in the long term.
Why This Book Made the List:
Much like the Art of the Longview, the Innovator’s Dilemma is not directly about new product development but understanding his concepts are critical if you want to bring a disruptive product to market.
Christensen was considered the pre-eminent thinker in the innovation space and as Harvard Business School professor was able to back up his work with peer reviewed research (he wrote many other books and passed away in early 2020).
Two of his concepts greatly influenced my Product Opportunity Mapping framework. One is that well-established companies that want to keep growing are impaired by their incumbency as internal bias prevents then from being truly innovative. This makes it overly difficult for them to bring new products to market.
With many the companies I’ve worked with, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time helping them break through those biases before they can make real progress related to new product development. Without breaking through, the bias becomes an anchor and creates a drag on development efforts.
On the flipside, recognizing these biases creates an opportunity for senior executives and decision-makers to embrace innovation and deviate from the norm. It’s a riskier approach in the short-term but as Christensen points out some of the largest companies have gone out of business after being disrupted by a new incumbent. The best illustrative story in the book is about the one-time industry giant US Steel being disrupted by Nucor. More recent examples would be Amazon disrupting Sears or Kmart or Netflix putting Blockbuster out of business.
In the case of Nucor, they used lower cost steel making methods to manufacture rebar and other low value items that US Steel was ignoring. Nucor gradually took over the rest of the market and US Steel eventually went out of the business as they couldn’t compete due to their high cost base. One of the key lessons when coming up with a new product offering is that you don’t need to go out and “boil the ocean” right away. Finding a niche entry point and then owning it can lead to an effective “land and expand strategy”.
4. Winning at New Products by Robert Cooper (2001)
Quick Summary:
Winning at New Products by Robert Cooper is a guidebook for developing and launching new products. The book outlines a systematic and step-by-step approach to product development, including idea generation, market research, concept testing, and commercialization. Cooper emphasizes the importance of a well-defined and organized process, effective team collaboration, and the use of data and market insights to guide decision-making. The book provides practical tips and tools to increase the chances of creating a successful new product.
Why This Book Made the List:
In the early part of my career (much of it in the pre-Internet era), I kept searching for professional development courses and books on the topic of new product development. Not much was out there but one of the thought leaders at the time was Robert Cooper who wrote the book Winning at New Products.
It was a thick and somewhat scholarly book and made a major contribution to the process and theory new product development at the time.
As a systems-based thinker, I like a well-organized and defined approach and that part of the book appealed to me. However, I soon realized his processes were a bit too structured and not applicable in many situations. The structure was great but not the nuance. I’m oversimplifying Cooper’s and similar processes but product development was presented like a recipe with a step-by-step process and at the end a cake comes out of the oven.
It doesn’t work that way any more as new products need to iterate and pivots are almost always inevitable (I should note that later editions of the book did focus on lean and iterative product development processes).
One of the other contributions Cooper made was emphasizing the importance of well-defined gates and undertaking progress assessments before moving to the next stage of development. This adds a needed discipline to the product development process which is often missing at both small and large companies.
With Product Opportunity Mapping, I don’t follow his approach but I do emphasize the importance of adding gates, holding regularly scheduled, facilitated and tightly structured product review meetings and making sure the hard decisions are made sooner rather than later.
In these meetings a Yes/No decision gate is too constricting and instead my recommendation is to have four options: Yes (keep going): Hard No (stop completely); Pivot (change direction based on new data); or Park (the timing isn’t right but could be later).
5. The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win by Steve Blank (2003)
Quick Summary:
The Four Steps to the Epiphany is a book by Steve Blank that outlines a customer development process for creating successful products. His four steps are: 1) customer discovery, 2) customer validation, 3) customer creation, and 4) company building and the book emphasizes the importance of customer involvement and feedback throughout the product development process. Blank argues that traditional business planning methods are inadequate for startups and he emphasizes the importance of rapid iteration and pivoting based on customer feedback in order to create a successful product.
Why This Book Made the List:
Many of the books on my list and the litany of online content sources will focus on executing a business model. In contrast, Blank’s approach is to encourage entrepreneurs to search for a business model.
He notes the traditional product development business model is to follow a sequence of Concept -Development - Testing - Launch (much as was described in Cooper’s book noted above). In contrast, Blank emphasized that there are a few key things you must get right before you enter the product and technology development cycle.
His epiphany (for me) was to move from a product development model to a customer development model and first search for a viable model (with customer discovery and customer validation built in and doing some pivots along the way) before executing on the model (with the customer creation and company building processes integrated).
Blank also offers some timeless quotes which I often use in my Product Opportunity Mapping materials:
“Startups don’t fail because they lack a product; they fail because they lack customers and a proven financial model.”
“…you can’t be successful until you understand who you are selling your product to and why they will buy it.”
“Simply put, a startup should focus on reaching a deep understanding of customers and their problems, their pains, and the jobs they need done to discover a repeatable roadmap of how they buy and building a financial model that results in profitability”
Following his thinking, developing a new product or service means learning as much as possible about customers in advance. In turn, this has to be integrated into your product offering - and repeat the process over and over as several iterations and pivots may be required. In contrast, placing too much effort on execution at an early stage of a startup will likely put it out of business.
His thinking overlaps with what is presented in the Lean Startup by Eric Ries (noted below) who in fact was a student of Blank’s at UC Berkeley.
For my Product Opportunity Mapping framework, the key Blank insight that influenced my thinking was to first figure out the problem your product will solve for a customer (from their perspective) before you invest heavily into development. Blank was apparently famous for saying “get out of the building” and “there are no answers inside your office”. This means you must talk to customers first and understand their unmet needs.
6. Jobs to be Done: Theory to Practice by Tony Ulwick (2016)
The concept of “jobs-to-be-done” is critical in new product development. It is the notion that a product is “hired” to perform a job which in turn alleviates a pain or creates a gain that the “employer” is currently experiencing. It also reflects the sad reality in the product development world that your customers don’t really care about you, your company or your product – they only need to get a job done and are looking to hire products to complete it.
The Jobs-To-Be-Done methodology has become very popular and many authors and consultants have carved out their own points-of-view.
Quick Summary:
A representative book in this area is "Jobs to be Done: Theory to Practice" by Tony Ulwick and it goes into detail on the Jobs to be Done (“JTBD”) framework which helps businesses identify and address customer needs more effectively. He outlines a process for identifying and understanding customer jobs, measuring customer progress towards desired outcomes, and using customer metrics to continually improve products and services. Ulwick’s premise is that customers "hire" products or services to do specific “jobs”. His framework
Why This Book Made the List:
There are several “jobs-to-be-done” books on the market and the key message in them all is that most product teams tend to think about how good their product is and less so what a customer actually needs and wants.
All the JTBD books emphasize the need to learn as much as possible about a potential customer so that your product can alleviate a pain-point or create a gain in their personal or business lives. For convenience, these can be categorized as: Functional Jobs (complete a specific task); Social Jobs (want to look good or gain status); Personal/Emotional Jobs (seeking an emotional state; feel better); Supporting Jobs (context of purchasing or consuming value). As well, the product team needs to understand the “Job Context” which is how and when it is performed and its importance. Every customer, their job-to-be-done, problem to solve are different but the consistent element is understanding this from the customer’s perspective. Plus, these pains and gains can be categorized as Financial (money-based); Productivity (time-based); Process (improving an existing process); or Support (helping support another function).
Quick Summary:
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries is a book about a more nuanced approach to entrepreneurship and innovation. Ries argues that traditional approaches to business and product development are often too slow and inefficient and instead he proposes a "lean" method that emphasizes rapid experimentation, continuous iteration, and data-driven decision making. The goal of this approach is to help entrepreneurs and startups create successful products and companies by reducing waste, minimizing risk, and maximizing learning. His book describes practical tools and techniques for implementing the “Lean Startup” approach, including the "Build-Measure-Learn" feedback loop and the "Minimum Viable Product."
Why This Book Made the List:
Ries was a student of Steve Blank’s at UC Berkeley where he launched into lean startup methodologies.
Unlike Cooper’s book which treated product development as a much more as a linear approach, Ries emphasized the need for a "Minimum Viable Product" where you test out parts of a product before spending too much time building a full product. Getting feedback as early as possible, combats one of the most common new product failure modes: launching a product that nobody wants to buy.
He also emphasized the "Build-Measure-Learn" feedback loop which translates into undertaking rapid iterations of new product features and testing hypotheses.
In addition, he also came up with the commonly used “Business Model Canvas” template which is a useful for thinking through the different aspects of a new product. In my Product Opportunity Mapping methodology, I suggest using a pre-cursor tool called a Product Opportunity Summary in advance of a Business Model Canvas to make sure the fundamentals of a new product are sound before digging in to the details.
8. Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters (2011) - Richard Rumelt
Quick Summary:
Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt offers a framework for effective strategic planning and emphasizes the critical distinction between good and bad strategies. His book describes a strong strategy as having three main elements: a clear and honest diagnosis of challenges, the formulation of a guiding policy, and a set of coherent actions. He stresses the importance of focus, adaptability, and continuous reassessment and provides real-world examples to illustrate these principles (he doesn’t pull punches in this regard).
Why This Book Made the List:
One of the biggest problems my clients have is not aligning their product strategies with their corporate strategies and Rumelt’s book offers a valuable framework to think that through and enhance internal strategic thinking and decision-making skills.
The core of the Product Opportunity Mapping framework is how to identify, evaluate and select new product opportunities for a company to grow and diversify their revenues. I encourage my clients to take a step back and make sure this approach is aligned with their corporate strategy and ask why they are investing finite time and resources into new products. If they can’t can’t answer this question, the odds are stacked against them.
Quick Summary:
The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen is a guide to product innovation using Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) and rapid customer feedback. Olsen’s book provides a step-by-step process for creating MVPs and using them to validate product ideas and make data-driven decisions. He emphasizes the importance of articulating a clear customer problem, using customer feedback to inform product development, and using metrics to measure progress and success. The book also covers lean methodologies and its application to product development processes. Overall, the book is a good resource for product teams to build better products faster and with greater confidence.
Why This Book Made the List:
The Lean Product Playbook emphasizes the importance of MVPs and iterating products by generating feedback from potential users and customers. A key and very helpful insight Olsen articulated is the concept of separating the “Solution Space” from the “Problem Space”.
Most teams developing a new product tend to jump to potential solutions (i.e. the Solution Space) before really understanding their customer’s problem to be solved (i.e. the Problem Space). By focusing on the problem first, you can develop an understanding of the value created for customers – from their perspective – when you relieve their pain or create a gain.
From my experience with Product Opportunity Mapping projects, jumping right to the Solution Space before truly understanding the Problem Space is very common.
Quick Summary:
Monetizing Innovation is a book that explains how companies can design products to maximize revenue. The authors, Madhavan Ramanujam and Georg Tacke, argue that pricing should be considered at the same time as product design, rather than as an afterthought. Their book provides strategies for determining the right price for a product, based on factors such as market demand and competition. The authors also discuss ways to manage pricing over time, including adjusting prices to reflect changes in the market and offering discounts and promotions. The overall message of the book is that companies can increase revenue by thinking about pricing when designing products and making adjustments as needed.
Why This Book Made the List:
This is a book about pricing and monetizing strategies from two partners at the world’s largest pricing consultancy. For teams developing new products, two key concepts from the book are very important to understand.
The first is understanding the difference between a pricing strategy and a monetization strategy. Pricing is what you charge for a product. It is more than a dollar figure as it is an indicator of what a customer wants and how much they want it. Monetization, on the other hand, is how you charge for a product and is just as important as the price. There are many different monetization models (subscription, pay-as-you-go, freemium, etc.) which can influence the success and profitability of a product offering.
Second, the discussion and analysis need to set pricing and monetization strategies is often left too late and too close to a launch date. This means not enough time is spent on an issue that can make or break a product when it is launched. In fact, Ramanujam and Tacke argue that a product should be designed around the price or, at least, needs to be considered upfront during the development process.
Leaving pricing decisions to the later stages of the product development process is a common sin of the clients I work with. I sometimes get a call from a client to help set a price for a new product in an hour when in reality the process might take weeks or months.
11. Sell More Faster: The Ultimate Sales Playbook for Startups (Techstars) by Amos Schwartzfarb (2019)
Quick Summary:
Sell More Faster by Amos Schwartzfarb is a guidebook for startups on how to effectively sell their products and services. It covers a wide range of topics such as defining an ideal customer, crafting a compelling value proposition, building a sales process, and hiring and managing a sales team. Schwartzfarb draws on his own experience and success as a startup founder and sales consultant to provide practical and actionable advice. The ultimate goal of the book is to help startups achieve sustainable revenue growth and succeed in today's competitive market.
Why This Book Made the List:
As the name would suggest, this book is about selling. Product development is about product development but without the ability to attract and convert potential customers to paying customers, success will be elusive.
Schwartzfarb outlines a logical and powerful selling strategy and provides case study examples to underline his points. A key sub-theme of the book is the importance of having a compelling value proposition at the core of any new product as well as understanding who the ideal customer will be.
As an aside, this book is published by Techstars which is a global technology accelerator program (full disclosure: I’m a mentor to several Techstars accelerator programs). Their website offers free access to excellent and extensive content for starting and scaling a new company. They call it the Entrepreneurs Toolkit and it is available at: https://toolkit.techstars.com/
Techstars has also published other books which are also worthwhile reading:
Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business (Techstars) - Matt Blumberg (2020)
Honorable Mentions:
12. Strategyzer Series:
Strategyzer is a leader in innovation consulting for large corporations, has published a number of books and offers a series of seminars, videos and other sources of educational content. Their books are central to innovation and new product development processes and are worth looking at:
Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur
Value Proposition Design by Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, Alan Smith and Trish Papadakos
Testing Business Ideas by David J. Bland and Alexander Osterwalder
13. Mapping Innovation: A Playbook for Navigating a Disruptive Age by Greg Satell (2017)
Quick Summary:
Mapping Innovation by Greg Satell is a book that provides a roadmap for navigating rapidly changing and disruptive business environments. Satell argues that innovation is the key to success in today's fast-paced market and outlines a series of practical steps that organizations can take to foster a culture of innovation. The book covers topics such as identifying opportunities, creating new business models, and building an innovation-focused team and emphasizes the importance of being adaptive, learning from failure, and embracing experimentation. Ultimately, Mapping Innovation provides practical advice and tools for businesses to stay ahead in a constantly evolving business landscape.
Why This Book Made the List:
Product Opportunity Mapping is focused on how to develop a successful new product. However, research shows the majority of new products either fail to meet expectations or fail completely. This means your company should not be focused on one product but building a pipeline of multiple product opportunities and managing them as a portfolio.
Satell’s book talks about how to do this at an organizational level and gives insights to decision makers who are putting an innovation strategy together for their company.
14. The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz (2014)
Quick Summary:
The Hard Thing About Hard Things is a business book written by entrepreneur and investor Ben Horowitz of the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. His book provides practical insights and advice on how to successfully lead a company through difficult times, such as managing rapid growth, dealing with failure, and making tough decisions. It also covers his personal experiences building and scaling technology companies and highlights the key lessons he has learned about leadership and management. The central message of the book is that building a successful business is a challenging and difficult process, but by facing the hard things head-on and embracing the discomfort of uncertainty, one can achieve great results.
Why This Book Made the List:
The Hard Things About Hard Things is not a product development book but a business building book. Nonetheless, I include it as it is one of the most insightful books I’ve read about building a successful company.
Horowitz’s writing rang true for me given my own experiences and since new product development failure rates are high, dealing with difficult situations is inevitable. His book offers many insights on how to deal with these challenges and, as a side note, the Andreessen Horowitz website offers invaluable content (podcasts, articles, etc.) for keeping up with technology trends and successful company building.
That’s the list - what do you think? What additions would you have? Please let me know if you have more to add and why.