Maintenance Activity: That set of product development tasks aimed at solving initial market and user problems with the new product or service.

Manufacturability: The extent to which a new product can be easily and effectively manufactured at minimum cost and with maximum reliability.

Manufacturing Assembly Procedure: Procedural documents normally prepared by manufacturing personnel that describe how a component, subassembly or system will be put together to create a final product.

Manufacturing Design:  The process of determining the manufacturing process that will be used to make a new product.

Manufacturing Test Specification and Procedure: Documents prepared by development and manufacturing personnel that describe the performance specifications of a component, subassembly or system that will be met during the manufacturing process, and that describe the procedure by which the specification will be assessed.

Market Development: Taking current products to new consumers or users. This effort may involve making some product modifications.

Market-Driven: Allowing the marketplace to direct a firm's product innovation efforts.
Market Segmentation:  The act of dividing an overall market into groups of consumers with similar needs, where each of the groups differs from others in the market in some way.

Market Share: A company's sales in a product area as a percent of the total market sales in that area.

Market Testing: The product development stage when the new product and its marketing plan are tested together. A market test simulates the eventual marketing mix and takes many different forms, only one of which bears the name test market.

Maturity Stage: The third stage of the product life cycle. This is the stage where sales begin to level due to heavy competition, alternative product options or changing buyer or user preferences.

Metrics: A prescribed set of measurements to track product development and allow a firm to measure the impact of process improvements over time. These measures generally vary by firm, but may include measures characterizing both aspects of the process, such as time to market, and duration of particular process stages, as well as outcomes from product development such as the number of products commercialized per year and percentage of sales due to new products.

Multifunctional Team: A group of individuals brought together from more than one functional area of a business to work on a problem or process which requires the knowledge, training and capabilities across the areas to successfully complete the work.

Needs Statement: Summary of consumer needs and wants, described in customer terms, to be addressed by a new product.

Net Present Value (NPV): Method used in comparably evaluating investments in very dissimilar projects by discounting the current and projected future cash inflows and outflows back to the present value based on the discount rate, or cost of capital, of the firm.

New Product: A term of many opinions and practices, but most generally defined as a product (either a good or service) new to the firm marketing it. Excludes products that are only changed in promotion.

New Product Developer: The person responsible for developing new products using a structured new product development process.  This person may actually lead a project team or be responsible for a platform of new products.  A new product developer may also be a team member and work with the project manager to develop and launch new products.

New Product Idea: A preliminary plan or purpose of action for formulating new products or services.

Operations: A term that includes manufacturing but is much broader, usually including procurement, physical distribution and for services, management of the offices or other areas where the services are provided.

Operator's Manual: The written instructions to the users of a product or process. These may be intended for the ultimate customer or for the use of the manufacturing operation.

Pareto Chart: A bar graph with the bars sorted in descending order used to identify the largest opportunity for improvement. Pareto charts distinguish the "vital few" from the "useful many."

Payback: The time, usually in years, from some point in the development process until the commercialized product or service has recovered its costs of development and marketing. While some firms take the point of full-scale market introduction of a new product as the starting point, others begin the clock at the start of development expense.

Perceptual Mapping: A quantitative market research tool used to understand how customers think of current and future products.

Performance Indicators: Criteria with which the performance of a new product in the market can be evaluated.

Performance Measurement System: The system which enables the firm to monitor the relevant performance indicators of new products in the appropriate time frame.

Physical Elements: The components that make up a product. These can be both components (and individual parts) in addition to minor subassemblies of components.
Platform Product: The design and components which are shared by a set of products in a product family. From this platform, numerous derivative products can be designed.

Portfolio Criteria: The set of criteria against which the business judges proposed product development projects to create a balanced and diverse mix of ongoing efforts.

Portfolio Management: A business process by which a business unit decides on the mix of active projects, staffing and dollar budget allocated to each project. See also pipeline

Process Map: A workflow diagram which uses an x-axis for process time and y-axis which shows participants and tasks.

Process Mapping: The General Electric term for "garage bill" scheduling.

Process Owner: The executive manager responsible for the strategic results of the process. This includes process throughput, quality of output and participation within the organization.

Process Managers: The operational managers responsible for insuring the orderly and timely flow of ideas and projects through the process.

Product: Term used to describe all goods and services sold. Products are bundles of attributes (features, functions, benefits and uses) and can be either tangible as in the case of physical goods, or intangibles such as those associated with service benefits or a combination of the two.

Product and Process Performance Success: The extent to which a new product meets its technical performance and product development process performance criteria.
Product Definition: Defines the product, including the target market, product concept, benefits to be delivered, positioning strategy, prices point, and even product requirements and design specifications.

Product Development: The overall process of strategy, organization, concept generation, product and marketing plan creation and evaluation, and commercialization of a new product.

Product Development & Management Association (PDMA): A not-for-profit professional organization whose purpose is to seek out, develop, organize and disseminate leading edge information on the theory and practice of product development and product development processes. The PDMA uses local, national, and international meetings and conferences, educational workshops, a quarterly newsletter (Visions), a bi-monthly scholarly journal (Journal of Product Innovation Management), research proposal and dissertation proposal competitions, and this handbook to achieve its purposes.

Product Development Portfolio: The collection of new product concepts that are within the firm's ability to develop, are most attractive to the firm's customers and deliver short- and long-term corporate objectives, spreading risk and diversifying investments.

Product Development Process: A disciplined and defined set of tasks and steps which describe the normal means by which a company repetitively converts embryonic ideas into salable products or services.

Product Development Strategy: The strategy that guides the product innovation program.

Product Development Team: A multifunctional group of individuals chartered to plan and execute a new product development project.

Product Discontinuation: A product or service which is withdrawn or removed from the market because it no longer provides an economic, strategic or competitive advantage to include it in the firm's portfolio of offerings.

Product Discontinuation Timeline: The process and timeframe in which a product is carefully withdrawn from the marketplace. The product may be discontinued immediately after the decision is made, or it may take a year or more to implement the discontinuation timeline, depending on the nature and conditions of the market and product.

Product Life Cycle: The four stages that a new product is thought to go through from birth to death: introduction, growth, maturity and decline. Controversy surrounds whether products go through this cycle in any predictable way.

Product Line: A group of products marketed by an organization to one general market. The products have some characteristics, customers and uses in common and may also share technologies, distribution channels, prices, services and other elements of the marketing mix.

Product Manager: The person assigned responsibility for overseeing all of the various activities that concern a particular product. Sometimes called a brand manager in consumer packaged goods firms.

Product Plan: Detailed summary of the key elements involved in a new product development effort such as product description, schedule, resources, financial estimations and interface management plan.

Product Platforms: Underlying structures or basic architectures which are common across a group of products or which will be the basis of a series of products commercialized over a number of years.

Product Rejuvenation: The process by which a mature or declining product is altered, updated, repackaged or redesigned to lengthen the product life cycle and in turn extend sales demand.

Product Requirements Document: The contract between, at a minimum, marketing and development describing completely and unambiguously the necessary attributes of the product to be developed.

Product Superiority: A product differentiated from those offered by competitors by offering consumers benefits and value for money above what other products offer. This is one of the critical success factors in commercializing new products.

Project Leader:  The person responsible for managing an individual new product development project through to completion. He or she is responsible for ensuring that milestones and deliverables are achieved and that resources are utilized effectively.

Project Management: Both a process and set of tools and techniques concerned with defining the project's goal, planning all the work to reach the goal, leading the project and support teams, monitoring progress, and seeing to it that the project is completed in a satisfactory way.

Project Sponsor: The authorization and funding source of the project. The person who defines the project goals and to whom the final results are presented. Typically a senior manager.

Prototype: A physical model of the new product concept. Depending upon the purpose, prototypes may be non-working, functionally working or both functionally and aesthetically complete.