Product Development from 30,000 feet -Or- The things you may never think about that will affect the cost and marketability of your new product...

This article takes a look at product development from the 'top of the mountain' in order to get a more 'whole-istic' view of stealth influences (beyond the hard technical, functional, performance, production and cost sways) that will affect a product's overall definition. Admittedly, There exist quite a few articles, books and courses about 'Holistic Product Development' and 'Integrated New Product Development' that emphasize the organic or functional relation between parts and the whole (check out the WEB). This article takes a slightly different approach - away from more assertive abstractions to more street-level revelations based on years of viewing product development from 30,000 feet.

But first...

Physicists, Theologians, Physicians, Sociologists, among others, speak of the holistic understanding of their domains of discourse. Holism is the idea that all the properties of a given system (biological, chemical, engineering, social, mental, political, linguistic, etc.) cannot be determined or explained by the sum of its component parts alone. Instead, the system as a whole determines how the parts interact and behave as the 'whole'. That is, some of the parts may act differently when together than they do when apart. Conversely, some feel that reductionism is sufficient to explain inter-operating components when gathered as a whole; reductionism states that the nature of complex things can always be explained by reducing the complex to simpler or more fundamental components. Products are many times designed by reductionism; i.e., to operate as allowed by the sum of its manufacturable components, subsystems and accessories. This article posits that a product (or a service) needs, instead, to be defined from a viewpoint of holism (or a view from 30,000 feet). This differs from the reductionism treatment because legitimate stakeholders, other than the consumers and producers, have a real effect on a product definition resulting from mutual interactions with each other (see the following figure).