A polymer business needed to increase the number of new product ideas flowing into its pipeline and have more winners get to market. Winners were defined as products bringing in more than $5 million in revenue in 3 years.

Working with the company’s product management cross-functional team, it was decided that the problem called for improvement in hard and soft skills. Hard skills included adopting a Stage Gate process for long and short-term product development.

The soft skills included ensuring teams had the “right” members to guarantee that decision-making was facilitated, and working with a champion to push the team culture to high performance.

Revenue value of the new product development pipeline increased 100%. Time-to-market for fast-tracked products was reduced from 5-6 months to 3-4 months. The team became very proficient at the gate process and team dynamics improved.