Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Does your group also make the decision on whether a new product makes business sense to do? Or is there someone at the group bringing you the potential new product that handles this?

I am not against forms, but you also will need the face to face sit down. I would make a form with the basic categories you will need to fill in and have the new product initiator fill in what they can (expectation is that they won't get much, and even with the sit down, you may still need a lot of follow up research). You then sit down together and try to fill in or figure out how to fill in the rest of the data needed.

If your group is responsible for making the business case, I would use a form that looks like a standard business plan. If someone else does that and you just have marketing responsibility, the the form would look a lot like a standard marketing plan.

In the ideal situation the marketing plan will come BEFORE the product is developed. There are two reasons for this:

First, it's critically important to understand consumer needs so you know what the product specs should be. There is no sense creating a product that doesn't meet some consumer need or won't improve consumers' (or customers') lives in some way.

Second, the biggest challenge is usually figuring out how to sell the product, not how to create it. If you can't figure out how you're going to market the product (and make money), there's no sense committing valuable/scarce resources to product development.

This is why it's impossible to separate the marketing plan from the business plan in most situations.

You'd want to be invited to all internal launch events to better understand the goals of the products. And as Michael indicated, be involved before the launch - when the product is just a gleam in someone's eye. Rather than give someone forms, it would likely be better to share your marketing perspective (what you know you need to do/assist to make a successful launch) with them, and for them to share their technical perspective (what they need to achieve to build a better mousetrap - and why they're building it). This creates increased awareness of others' needs, which will be useful in decision-making during the product launch process itself.

I'm completely against forms. It breaks creativity and fosters a tick-box mentality and is more aimed at low-level gatekeeping than high-performing groups. What you want are pitches. You can explain (ie communicate, discuss and train) what makes a good pitch then allow internal groups to pitch to you, possibly with a competitive element. The result will be not that they meet your minimum criteria vis-a-vis a form, but that the idea has to reach for the heights. If pitches don't hit the spot, again, you can communicate where improvements are necessary and use feedback and training to improve the pitch, and so project quality.