I often get asked how products like Facebook do it—grow so fast and so organically. Facebook possesses four messaging attributes that can be difficult to come by individually, let alone in one package:

1. A universally appealing value proposition
2. The network effect (where the value proposition grows even stronger as individuals bring their friends into the fold)
3. A user experience that is second to none (yes, amazing design is a messaging variable)
4. A “price” that is free.

Even still, the growth of sites like Facebook is never 100% viral, because media support is always present—a factor caused, of course, by their rapid growth rates.

Your employees and colleagues have a wealth of experience and lots of ideas. So why aren’t your brainstorming sessions generating the results you want?

According to Michael Myser, there are three simple rules you need to follow to ensure success:

First, brainstorming sessions are structured events that produce valuable results. Define what you want to accomplish ahead of time, and communicate the goals in advance. It is extremely important that participants have time to mentally prepare.

Second, set specific session rules, including time limits and ways to resolve arguments and criticism.

Third, make sure you have a leader. This should be a person that the brainstorming participants feel comfortable (so even far-out ideas are embraced) and willing to keep things on track (Michael Myser, “When Brainstorming Goes Bad,” Business 2.0, October 2006.)

According to a McKinsey & Company study, more than 70% of senior executives said that innovation will be one of the top three drivers of growth for their companies.

Unfortunately, at the same time they also said they were “generally disappointed” in their ability to promote it—but they knew intuitively that any sustainable effort must be grounded by their company’s people and culture.

A few years ago,BusinessWeek recounted how, in a joint survey with the Boston Consulting Group, one thousand senior managers ranked slow development times as the number one obstacle to innovation. Innovation, the publication said, is about selecting and executing the right ideas and bringing them to market in record time (Jena McGregor, “The World’s Most Innovative Companies,” BusinessWeek, April 24, 2006).

A critical success factor is so essential to achieving a desired outcome that if it’s missing, or falls below an acceptable range, your project is destined to fail.

D. Ronald Daniel of McKinsey & Company started the discussion about critical success factors in 1961, and Jack Rockart of MIT gave it renewed and expanded life in 1986. Every aspect of your business has at least some critical success factors. What they are depends on what you’re trying to do and its scope. They can apply to one specific task, or they can apply to your business in its entirety. They can be specific and unique or they can be broad and universal.

Once in place, critical success factors become ideal “filters” for subsequent decision making.

The Nielsen Company, a leader in providing media measurement and other consumer and marketing information, recently did a study examining over 50 dimensions of new product development. Success among the largest packaged-goods companies varied widely. A key finding: In those companies where management stays away from the day-to-day development activity, much more revenue from new products was generated. Does it follow then, that the best place for “blue-sky” innovators is far away from corporate headquarters?

The second stage of my career was spent in high-tech hardware and software companies, where I learned about supply chains and distribution channels. By this point, globalization was in full swing, and I was witness to a sweeping transition from heavy vertical integration to heavy outsourcing.

I saw how to use infrastructure and component costs to our strategic advantage. One company I worked for, while it was a much smaller entity, drove an entrenched multibillion dollar industry leader to the brink of bankruptcy. It developed a single-minded channel strategy, and then provided liberal margins to resellers, enabled by lower manufacturing costs in Taiwan.

Our competitor was stuck with sales overhead it couldn’t shed fast enough. It was an eye-opener: the unique power of the supply chain in all its glory.

Determining the causes of product success has been the subject of great interest and rigorous study since the beginning of the modern marketing era, starting in the 1950s.

From academia to large companies, from consultants to advertising and public relations agencies, from businesspeople to sociologists, psychiatrists and even neuroscientists, there has been a determined march forward to discover the mysteries of why people buy the products they do.

The guesswork of the distant past has been replaced with high-quality research and well documented field experiments. It may not be physics, but important principles have emerged from this collective effort, validated time and again through decades of application.

New Product Development is now a science.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, when factories in China build products for global brands, they get “four pennies on the dollar” for a pair of Nike shoes, or maybe $25 dollars from a popular consumer electronics device that sells for $750. They leave “a boatload of money” on the table, according to the secretary-general of the China Industrial Overseas Development and Planning Association.

So China is no longer satisfied with being just the world’s factory—it wants to move to the “top” of the supply chain where margins are fattest. To do that, the country needs it own mega brand names, and intellectual property. Lenovo was purchased from IBM, Volvo was purchased from Ford. But much, much more needs to be done.

And they need to move quickly, as new contract manufacturing aspirants from Mexico, Eastern Europe, and even Vietnam nip at their heels with even lower component costs and wages.

In January, 2010, another major consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, announced that it had surveyed over 300 employees at 28 leading products companies.

Once again, there were three fundamental new product development lessons that emerged: the most successful companies develop clear project goals, they emphasize cultural behaviors that lead to success, and they build strong relationships with customers. Companies that employed these principles were twice as likely to meet ROI targets.

For simplicity, we’ll distill those practices down to three core words: Goals, Culture, and Customers.

Years ago, a major consulting firm, Arthur Andersen, started a database of best practices for business activities. Later, after information and experience had accumulated through many years and possibly thousands of implementations, clients asked if any fundamental lessons had emerged from the more than thirty thousand pages of insight.

The response was yes, there were three things that stood out. The most successful companies were highly focused on building strong and lasting relationships with customers, they constantly improved their own businesses at all levels, and they used processes to keep those two main objectives running smoothly.

For simplicity, we’ll distill those practices down to three core words: Relationships, Proactive, and Processes.

Shortly after I began collecting background material for my book, I came across a press release from Bain & Company with this headline: “Less Complex Companies Grow Nearly Twice as Fast as Competitors.”

Bain examined the complexity of product and service offerings across a range of companies. Too many choices—product proliferation—were impeding customer action and a sure sign of lack of customer understanding. “Complexity is often a company’s largest hidden liability,” according to Bain’s head of global performance improvement practice.

Less complex companies grew revenue 1.7 times faster than their peers, reduced costs and accelerated customer decisions.

Creating a successful new product from scratch is one of life’s great accomplishments. It’s also one of the riskiest things you could ever commit yourself to. Every year, tens of thousands of entrepreneurs gamble their jobs, houses, and futures to pursue nothing more than an idea.

Very few achieve their dreams.

Why would someone take on such risk? Money is certainly high on the list, as are recognition and the desire to have more control over one’s destiny. A surprising number of people I meet also want to have a positive impact on the world—to make a major contribution. A successful product can certainly do all these things: an endless number have bettered societies and changed lives forever.

The purpose of this blog is to celebrate new product development, yes, but also something more practical: to mitigate risk, by providing a forum for discussing those things most important in building, marketing and supporting successful products today. From critical success factors to creative problem solving, we’ll attempt to capture and archive the best ideas here. The ones that work.

It’s written for anyone with a vested interest in product success, which at last count was just about everyone in business.

Thank you for your interest, and if you choose to participate in our discussion, thank you for that as well.