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.