Risks

Efforts to improve new products risk falling into a product development death spiral:

• As defects occur, more and more checks are put in place to prevent them.
  
• As the number of checks and procedures multiply, designers spend more time controlling processes than developing new products, which increases the number of defects even more.
  
• As defects multiply, schedules lengthen, time-to-market increases and competitors beat your team to market.
• Product quality suffers.
  
• Designers become increasingly distant from customers and risk delivering the wrong product.
  

The implementation of Lean product development also entails risks:

• Lean product development is sub-optimal because basic process discipline is not in place before the Lean initiative begins.
  
• Best practices (for example Scrum) are implemented that do not match the level of process maturity of the organization.
  
• Management expectations and infrastructures are not adjusted to fit the Lean model.
  

Opportunities

Opportunities associated with Lean product development include:

• Dramatic reductions in product development cycle time.
  
• Measurable improvements in product quality.
  
• Significant reduction in rework with associated cost savings.
  
• More time and effort expended on value-added activities that make a difference to customers.