Abaya Phadnis is the Head of Supplier Technical Operations Program Management for Google Devices.
The learnings that come from the new product introduction (NPI) process are hard-won and can have a significant organizational impact. However, capturing and sharing NPI discoveries can be difficult, particularly in organizations where secrecy is a core part of the culture. Teams may not see the value in participating, may not want to adopt new best practices and may be afraid of revealing mistakes they made. However, for any organization that will make more than one generation of a product – it’s critical to aggregate and use learnings from each generation to build organizational knowledge. Many organizations rely on individual engineers to remember the lessons learned from program to program — but that's a high-risk gambit.
Abaya Phadnis is a strong advocate for the value Technical Program Managers play in incorporating learnings from each new product generation.
At Google Devices, we’ve developed a process that ensures everyone has access to and is drawing from the same discoveries – so that no matter your team or department, you’re always building on the best solutions to date. These are our four best practices for generational knowledge-building that can be applied in any company looking to learn with every new product.
1. Go Wide and Distill Principles
Discoveries and innovation during NPI can be applied across parts, product lines and product generations, so it’s important to aggregate and share those learnings. Attempting to share a wide set of individual learnings with different business units can be difficult, so lessons gleaned from NPI must be converted into generic product development principles that can be applied across the company and functions in various scenarios. Here’s an example relating to color limit samples.
Example: Locking Color Limit Samples
Problem:
Chronic delays in locking color limit samples across all hardware product lines trigger a cascade of risks: production readiness, material availability, formulation methods and other critical aspects.
These delays threaten last-minute color cancellations that have marketing and revenue impacts, but also inflate operational costs due to ambiguity around part-level yield and capital equipment requirements.
This problem causes stress for both team members and executives, and results in additional meetings and late-night calls. This process only works due to heroism – which is unsustainable in the long run.
Google Pixel 6 / 6 Pro launched for Fall 2021 with multiple color options and a brand new industrial design. Photo courtesy of Google, used with permission.
Method:
Before proposing a solution, we acknowledged the complexities. Determining the final approval authority for limit samples, ensuring design and process readiness for accurate mass production representation and maintaining the flexibility for trendy color development were key considerations. Balancing these factors, we identified Design Validation Testing (DVT) entry as the optimal time to lock color limit samples.
Solution:
With buy-in from Industrial Design teams, Engineering Program Managers and Supplier Development Engineering, we established clear color dry-run milestones and material development checkpoints to ensure we stayed on track.
2. Leadership Support is Critical
Google leadership understands the value and importance of centralizing knowledge across the enterprise, so they incentivize program managers to run it as part of their responsibilities. This results in high-quality outputs for every program versus relying on ambitious program managers to carve out time for the process. Since it involves cross-functional support, leadership "air cover" is necessary to ensure the overall knowledge gathering is complete and actually useful for future teams and programs.
One way leaders can garner support from their peer leaders for this process, especially if they aren’t eagerly jumping in, is to connect it back to core principles for leading teams (such as 8D problem solving) or the company’s values. While Google is guided by “Do the Right Thing” and “Respect the User” – many organizations have specific goals around providing the best products they can for their customers. Generational knowledge capture and sharing is part of delivering the best product experience for future customers.
3. Overcoming Resistance to New Best Practices
Teams who have solved the same problem differently in the past may be reluctant to change something that works for them -- even if the new method might have advantages. In some cases, there may also be strong business reasons to not change something already implemented.
Standardizing principles, processes, and best practices is critical to eliminating siloed knowledge and should be the goal.
Abaya PhadnisHead of Module & Mechanical Tech Ops TPM, Google Devices
Some ideas for handling resistance with other teams are:
- Selling them on the benefits of the new methodology, particularly with metrics, data or anecdotes from their trusted colleagues.
- Cut-off or cut-in dates for a new methodology, providing time for a team to deprecate their methods.
- Carve-outs for places where it doesn't make business sense to change.
In rare instances, senior management and stakeholders may need to intervene to facilitate discussions and align teams -- but this should be reserved as a last resort. Management "forcing" new methods on teams can cause long-term cultural damage in an organization.
4. Foster a Culture of Learning
As engineers, we should be comfortable talking about and analyzing failures to extract learnings at the end of a program. But when members of the organization operate in an environment where they’re afraid to take risks or make mistakes in front of others, it results in a culture of fear and a lack of transparency. If you do make a mistake, it’s human nature to want to rectify it without anyone seeing it – but then important learning can be lost. It’s important for leadership to foster a blameless environment where this learning can happen. Leaders can start by modeling vulnerability and prioritizing issue resolution. By keeping the end goal in focus – like creating the best possible experience for the user – then we can prioritize sharing learnings that make that possible, even if those learnings occurred because of a team misstep.
Knowledge Contributions Create Lasting Impact
The key to generational knowledge building is a teamwide belief in the value of sharing best practices. In large organizations, this doesn’t happen naturally, so collaboration needs to be modeled, led, and supported by leaders. Breaking down silos of information and sharing discoveries enables individuals and teams to create a lasting, company-wide impact.