Here, he shares his perspectives on the firm’s product development work and how McKinsey expertise is applied to deliver distinctive client impact.

We work on three major topics in product development: process improvement, design-to-cost, and technology strategy. In technology strategy, finding the right solution might mean creating a new roadmap for a semiconductor company, or defining a strategy for developing hybrid engines.

Understanding the Entire Product Creation Process
In design-to-cost, where you have the clear aspiration of reducing cost by a certain percent, it means convincing technicians to apply different concepts or cheaper components. In process improvement, where our goal is to increase development efficiency and shorten time to market by at least 30 percent, there’s the difficulty of convincing people to follow a more structured and parallelized approach.

Understanding the entire product creation process is important in product development work. We think through the whole problem, bringing in knowledge and best practices from other industries.

Who We Are
At the core of McKinsey’s product development practice people are senior hires who have spent between 3 and 10 years in product development before joining the firm. They come from big and small companies and normally have a technical education.

It’s important that people bring not only the technical expertise, but also a thorough and fact-based way of thinking. Strong problem-solving capabilities are as important as experience in product design and development.

Often, we solve our clients’ product development challenges by working with more generalist consultants from McKinsey that are experienced in operations work.

How We Work Together
Take the example of a project for a diesel engine roadmap. There is a team of two generalist consultants and two experts. The experts need to understand the different technologies and details to make decisions in accordance with the client's technical and cost constraints.

The generalists’ skills are in making sure that the business plans are profitable, that the customer interface is addressed correctly, and that the process of translating customer requirements is done properly.

On any project the experts need to be accepted early on by the client’s technical department. The generalists, on the other hand, must synthesize arguments and ideas early, work with client management, and draw in further knowledge and examples from across the firm.

Creating a Framework to Build Understanding
A challenge for us has been to structure the broad area of product development with its many different topics and subtopics and industry applications in a reasonable way that companies can understand.

Using our collective expertise, we have introduced the Research and Development (R&D) System, a framework that connects client problems and improvement approaches. We start our approach by specifying the business problem the client has. This could be slow time to market, too expensive products, or lack of innovation.

According to the specific problem, we apply the appropriate set of improvement levers. Normally we implement the changes in a pilot project, i.e., we choose a critical development project, understand the challenges, and readjust the development approach together with the client.