With the new year comes new resolutions, intentions and plans. For those of the product development persuasion, that means continuing to pick the right ideas to champion, design, develop, and bring to market. If only it was so tidy and predictable. Much as I’ve tried to normalize product development — and consistently pick the winners — it seems like Bob Hughes was right in his paraphrasing of Matsuo Basho, “An idea can turn to dust or magic depending on the talent that rubs against it.” So many influences, so little time!

Last year I worked for a company that swore by the stage-gate process pioneered by Dr. Robert G. Cooper. At Pearson Education, which like thousands of companies has stage-gate baked in to its product development DNA, I was fortunate to participate in SIT’s systematic innovative thinking workshop based on the research of Genrich Altschuller who identified processes that were common to successful patent claims. But while stage-gate lays out a rational product development process and SIT articulates an path to innovative thinking, neither is an algorithm for picking which projects are winners.

Then over the holidays I stumbled across Evan Williams’ blog (founder of both Blogger and Twitter) and read his post about an evaluation matrix that looks at six success factors:

Tractability - what is the difficulty, timing, competition?

Obviousness - why is it important?

Deepness - how much value does it deliver?

Wideness - how many people need/want it?

Discoverability - how will people learn about i?

Monetizability - how difficult is it to extract value from the product?

…and I had a eureka moment: What if the sum of stage-gate + SIT + the Williams’ matrix is greater than the parts? In other words, by applying SIT innovation thinking and the stage-gate process, then evaluating the winners based on Evan William’s matrix, it begins to look like a repeatable and truly success-oriented product development process. Just what’s called for on the day after the first day of the new year.