New Product Development Glossary

An iterative approach using short cycles, continuous feedback, and adaptive planning to develop products incrementally.

Pre-launch testing of a near-complete product by external users in real-world conditions to uncover defects.

Presenting a product idea to target consumers to evaluate acceptance and purchase intent before full development.

Simultaneous execution of product design, engineering, and manufacturing planning to shorten development time.

A statistical method for measuring how consumers value different attributes of a product to inform feature and pricing decisions.

A group of individuals from different organizational departments working together on a shared product development objective.

Designing products to be easy and economical to manufacture, considering production constraints during the design phase.

A human-centered, iterative methodology for innovation emphasizing empathy, ideation, prototyping, and testing.

Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, a systematic technique for identifying and prioritizing potential product or process failures.

A formal decision point in the Stage-Gate process where senior management evaluates project deliverables and decides whether to proceed.

A framework positing that customers hire products to accomplish specific tasks, guiding innovation toward desired outcomes.

A framework that classifies product features by their impact on customer satisfaction into must-be, performance, and delight categories.

The simplest functional version of a product used to test market assumptions and gather early customer feedback.

The present value of expected future cash flows from a project minus the initial investment, used to evaluate NPD project viability.

Developing a shared product architecture from which multiple derivative products can be efficiently created.

The reduction in sales of an existing product caused by the introduction of a new product from the same company.

The four stages a product passes through in the market: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline.

The complete collection of products and development projects managed by an organization, balanced for value and strategic fit.

A planning tool that uses matrices to link customer requirements to technical design specifications.

Quickly fabricating a physical or digital model of a product to test concepts and gather feedback early in development.

A phased product development framework with defined stages and management decision points (gates) for evaluating project continuation.

A 1-to-9 scale measuring the maturity of a technology from basic research through proven operational deployment.

The elapsed duration from initial product concept to commercial availability, a key competitive performance metric.

A Lean Startup concept referring to knowledge gained through rigorous experimentation with customers rather than assumptions.

A systematic research process for capturing and translating customer needs into product design requirements.