F. Michael Dedolph, Levi Deal Consulting
This presentation asks, and (partially) answers 3 questions:
- What makes some products and services successful and profitable while other, possibly more innovative, offerings languish?
- How is product quality related to profitability?
- Is it possible to design products to be more profitable?
People have promoted the idea of “design for X” in various contexts. The concept is simple—you can optimize product architecture for particular, hard to achieve goals, like security, reliability, performance, etc. Although product focused, the idea has roots in industrial psychology – people will work to accomplish what is seen as being important.
To “design for profitability”, the development team needs to focus the key things that drive profitability in their product space. This presentation identifies attributes associated with products and development methodologies that directly affect both quality and profitability, presents a preliminary model describing the primary attributes, their interrelationships, and their impact on product success.
This model is conceptual and intuitive; further work is needed to quantify, substantiate, extend, and/or refute the model attributes.
F. Michael Dedolph, 2014 Technical Paper
