Product development is not an altruistic activity: the only reason you develop a product is to create more profit than if you hadn't done so. This book introduces what product development is all about.

Nearly everyone spends up to half their product development budget on activities that add no value whatsoever to what the customer buys. This book section presents how product development generates profit for the company. The most profitable companies' success comes from their superior product development capability.

Before you embark on developing products, the way your company is organised will either help or hinder. Study this aspect before you start, to understand how much more competitive you could be. Unless you do, you may never develop really successful products fast and at low cost.

To develop products effectively, you first need to decide what kind of products, and which markets you will sell them into. As a starting point to product development activity, first set out product strategy: the main strategic issues and what you intend to do to satisfy customers.

The seven key project phases are: 1- Product predevelopment, 2- Researching the project to make a quantified business case, 3- Generating concepts (devise several fundamentally different concepts), 4- Optimising and trialling the concept, 5- The launch specification, 6- Detail design, plant installation and commissioning, 7- Early production and confirmation trials.

Tools and techniques are useful to reduce time and at the same time permit increased product complexity. But don't learn how to apply them in detail until you are about to use them. It's like learning a foreign language at school then needing to use it 20 years later; as well as forgetting, you didn't realise what would be useful or useless! There is an armoury of tools and techniques. But confusion exists because there are so many, with different and sometimes overlapping functions. Some can be used in more than one phase of the process. The following brief catalogue describes what the more useful ones can do. A fuller list appears in John Bicheno's book. The aim here is to describe not how you operate them but what they can help you to do. A number of works, referred to where appropriate, describe how you can learn to use and apply them in your programmes; but only when you are ready to.