What Stephen Hawking Might Say About Product Development

Have you ever wondered why many vacations seem unfulfilling? There’s a simple reason for that. While your vacation-self departs the reality dimension of your life, reality continues with no regard to your recreation. Bills still need to be paid, world events continue to occur, and all of your projects at work and home compile until your return.

Many people who scramble for email access while on holiday often do so just to keep the inbox load level under control. The non-vacation world marches on while you kick
back.

Product development projects run along their own “space-time,” a group of dimensions that combine a linear path of physical and temporal phenomena. There are often times within a project where we wish we had the ability to pause one part and proceed on to
the other, but are limited by the fact that so much of it is interconnected like the orbital gravity of a multi-planet solar system.

One way to divide the space-time of development projects is by its physical
development and its conceptual development. Physical development tasks are the “spatial” dimensions that can be measured, and are composed of the engineering and manufacturing of the physical parts and materials that make up the product. Conceptual development is the “time” dimension, composed of things that are often immeasurable, and represents the ideas behind the product, its market gestalt and all associated “fuzzy” work (like customer requirements). Connect these dimensions as a linear path toward a product launch and together you can say that the cycle of idea-to-implementation represents overall “space-time-to-market.”

The “critical path” is another term that can be used to represent the entire project as a combination of interdependent events. Many product development experts advise that such things as new technology development be removed from the critical path to prevent the new technology’s slower developmental timeline from interfering with the overall project’s schedule. This could be called “concurrent engineering” or “parallel processing,” but is also a method for altering the space-time of a project.

If you really want to take this analogy further, you can say that everything within a development effort, every task and decision, emits a strong or weak force upon the project. They each have a level of “gravity” that can push or pull on one another, thus affecting each other’s path in project space-time. Some management decisions definitely bend space or create dips that pull the project in a particular direction, just as massive heavenly bodies do to the fabric of the universe.

For example, let’s say you are trying to determine what type of material to use for the casing of a piece of your product. You know that one senior manager has a strong bias toward a particular formulation of plastic, so the strength of his gravitational force will pull this decision toward a specific materials path that can alter the project space-time. Each time a decision like this is made, the original space-time gets corrupted, with parametric consequences such as adding extra types of analysis, research, testing and other phenomena both predictable and unstable.

Many times such management decisions could be called “singularities,” which in physics is defined as “a point in space-time at which gravitational forces cause matter to have infinite density and infinitesimal volume, and space and time to become infinitely distorted.” It’s best to minimize project singularities where possible. If you have more than one singularity appear in your development system, whether it is scope-creep or an engineering change order, you can easily see how their gravitational force can affect product launch stability.

Suffice it to say that every major product development project creates its own big bang, and is like a universe unto itself. But unlike the cosmic universe, by comparison, we do have a much better understanding of how things work and have greater insight into both the visible and invisible of the development environment than in the world of quarks, photons and string theory. Still, the product development universe does eerily mimic the soupy nature of the cosmos, with the disciplines of engineering science intertwined with spooky actions that befuddle us and resist our attempts at firm control (or sometimes even observation). Sometimes it seems as much a wonder that products reach the market as the fact that the matter that composes them exists at all.

Buddhists postulate that the reality we call space and time exists only in the mind. Scientists do not rule out that time may not be linear and could even be manipulated and traveled within. If we ever do finally crack this code and learn what’s going on under the hood of our universe, time to market could be a thing of the past, although I’m not sure what the past will become, nor the future, but I may finally get a peaceful vacation.