Industrial companies make thousands of decisions across a product lifecycle.
Where should we invest? Which requirements matter most? Is the design mature enough to release? Should we approve the change? Are we ready to start production?
However, not every decision has the same impact on product success. When products take too long to reach the market, the natural response is often to improve the development process as a whole.
We believe there is a more focused place to start: Which decisions are actually controlling the flow of the product?
Product flow connects these decisions to product success. When critical decisions are made well and at the right time, the product can move. When they wait for information, alignment or approval, or need to be repeatedly reopened, the product slows down and business outcomes suffer.
This is the connection we mean by Industrial Performance: understanding which decisions shape product flow, and improving the conditions around those decisions to achieve better product outcomes.
Our Observation
In complex product organizations, we often see:
Functions improving their own processes while overall product lead time remains difficult to change.
Critical decisions waiting for information, alignment or approval while downstream work depends on them.
Important decisions are being revisited because trade-offs or consequences were not sufficiently understood the first time.
Product decisions are connected across the lifecycle. For example, a delay around design release can affect validation or unresolved validation issues can cause retesting. These are just a few examples, not universal bottlenecks as the critical decision chain depends on the product and organization
Our Perspective
This is how we think about Industrial Performance: understanding what controls product flow and creating the conditions for the critical product decisions within that flow to work well.
Start with the business outcome you want to improve:
If it is time to market, which decisions have the greatest influence on lead time?
If it is margin, where are product choices creating cost, complexity or rework?
If it is growth, which portfolio and product decisions determine where scarce resources are invested?
Then look closely at those product decisions.
Do decision-makers have the right facts? Are the important trade-offs visible? Is ownership clear? Is authority at the right level? And once the decision is made, can the organization execute it without repeatedly reopening it?
For one company, the critical decisions may sit in portfolio prioritization. For another, design maturity, engineering changes, validation or production readiness.
The point is not to optimize every decision equally. It is to understand which decisions disproportionately influence the outcome you are trying to improve and concentrate improvement there.
Key Takeaway
Improving Industrial Performance does not mean making every activity faster. Instead, find the product decisions that enable product success. Then make sure the facts, ownership, authority and execution around those decisions allow the product to move.
And that brings us to the other side of the same decision: even a well-designed product decision only creates value when people change behavior. Read more