Product Development Practices and their Effects on Project Success

Paper in proceeding, 2019

Many companies are implementing different product development practices to become more efficient, to shorten lead-time and reduce development cost. But, the research on comparing different practices, and their effects, is still limited. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate to what extent companies use different practices to increase the product development efficiency, and how this affects the success of the product development projects. The data was collected through a questionnaire targeting the Swedish manufacturing industry, including all firms with more than 100 employees and having product development within their business unit. The final sample was 160 business units, a response rate of 48.5 percent. A principal component analysis (PCA) showed that the different practices could be clustered into two groups, denoted ‘methods & tools’ and ‘working processes’. We also identified a paradox regarding the practices because a larger focus on ‘methods & tools’ was found to have a significant positive impact on perceived product development efficiency, but no significant effect on the product development project success. On the other hand, a larger focus on ‘working processes’ had a significant positive impact on development project success, but no significant effect on perceived product development efficiency.