3 Reasons Your Product Development Teams are Behind Schedule and Over Budget

Pivot International  |   April 03, 2018

Ask the head of product development at almost any company what their biggest issues are and you’ll likely hear one of two things: the team is always either behind schedule or over budget.

Managers and other supervisors often try to fix this the same way they fix problems in their manufacturing teams: by cutting costs, introducing more structure and deadlines, and, in general, tightening the reins.

However, in most cases, these tactics – which usually work well in manufacturing – just aren’t effective. This can leave product development managers frustrated, and wondering why their teams aren’t improving.

The answer? Product development is a different type of process, and it requires a different set of management strategies. Here are 4 reasons that your product development team is behind schedule and over budget, and ways you can help fix that.

Product development teams require more freedom.

When a company is accustomed to developing product after product, managers can lose sight of the fact that product development is, essentially, a creative process. And creative processes need some measure of freedom in order to be effective.

In manufacturing, where a team must follow a highly specific set of steps to complete a product, adding in more checkpoints or more oversight can help speed up a process or eliminate problems.

That’s not the case with your product developers. Developers need to be able to pivot if an idea isn’t working, or to follow a promising idea as it emerges.

More resources does not necessarily equal better results.

If a project is in danger of falling behind schedule, one of the manager’s first reactions is often to bring in additional team members.

Yet this can easily backfire, especially if the project isn’t clearly organized and running smoothly already. When your development team is already working at maximum capacity, they’ll have little time and energy available for getting a new team member up to speed so they can contribute something valuable to the project.

Instead of adding resources when a project isn’t progressing as needed, managers should look at the existing team, workflow, organization, and management to figure out what needs to change. Many times, it will be more a matter of management than of resources.

There isn’t a documented vision for the product being developed.

The lack of a clear, documented vision for the product a team is working on can create problems from the beginning through the end of the process. Competing ideas about what the end result should look and function like can spur creativity – but if these ideas don’t quickly coalesce into a great product, they can easily drag out the schedule.

Even if the product is the latest in a series of similar products, product development teams work much better and more efficiently when team members are on the same page about what they’re working toward.

Don’t assume that everyone knows the vision for the product simply because they’ve been working on it together. Write out the vision that your team is working toward, and keep it present and visible.

Product development is a necessarily variable process, which requires a different set of management skills. For more, read my post “Why So Many Product Launches Fail.”