How to accelerate product development
New Product Innovation isn’t just an advantage—it’s a necessity. Advancing technologies and evolving customer needs are pushing companies to develop products at breakneck speed. Yet, many organizations struggle to keep up.
The pressure is on: if you can’t match the accelerating pace of innovation, you may find your business overtaken by more agile competitors.
This blog post examines why innovation often lags inside companies—and, more importantly, how to accelerate product development without derailing your current success.
The Pressure to Innovate
The pace of innovation is increasing, and the stakes are high. Customers expect faster product improvements and new features at a rate that would have seemed absurd just a decade ago. Market leaders across industries are doubling down on speed.
This urgency has only grown with the rise of digital disruptors and trends like generative AI—technologies that can upend business models almost overnight. For established companies, the message is clear: to stay relevant, you have to innovate continuously and quickly.
But recognizing the need for speed is one thing; achieving it is another. Why do so many businesses, even those aware of the innovation imperative, struggle to move faster? Let’s look at some common roadblocks that slow down the innovation engine.
Challenges Slowing Innovation
Even when the destination—in this case, faster innovation—is obvious, the journey is often impeded by internal challenges. Here are a few key factors that hinder many companies’ pace of innovation:
Limited Resources & Competing Priorities
Innovation requires investment—of budget, time, and talent. Yet we often see resources consumed by sustaining engineering tasks aimed at maintaining the current business operations. These tasks often involve minor tweaks and design edits to eke out small margins. Meanwhile, R&D budgets are usually constrained, and teams find themselves overwhelmed by daily projects.
Many firms find it challenging to justify diverting funds or people to unproven ideas. Thus, limited budgets and competing priorities remain major obstacles to innovation in organizations. When every quarter is focused on immediate results, it’s hard to carve out time for experimenting with anything new.
Engineers Busy with Current Products
Your best engineers and product developers are usually focused on today’s revenue-generating products—and rightly so. The downside to this is that exploratory ideas often get sidelined. It’s the classic scenario: “Our engineers are so busy with current projects that we have little time for blue-sky innovation.”
This scenario plays out in companies everywhere. When internal teams are at capacity, even promising concepts can sit on the shelf because no one has the bandwidth to develop them. Established firms can become victims of their own success—an idea known as the Innovator's Dilemma - where focusing on what made you successful in the past comes at the expense of future opportunities.
Risk Aversion and Fear of Failure
Another innovation killer is a culture of risk aversion. If employees feel that failure is career-endangering, they’ll naturally play it safe.
New product ideas inherently come with uncertainty and risk. In risk-averse cultures, bold ideas get watered down or stuck in endless approval loops. A recent McKinsey survey found that risk aversion and siloed mindsets are among the biggest barriers to digital transformation and innovation.
Many organizations are so focused on avoiding mistakes that they inadvertently avoid breakthroughs. The result? Stagnation.
It’s important to remember that failure is often a prerequisite for innovation. If you’re not failing occasionally, you’re probably not learning (or innovating) enough. Companies struggling with innovation speed often need to address this cultural issue and encourage a mindset of “fail fast, learn faster.”
Long Development Cycles
Even when a company commits to a new product, traditional development processes can be slow. Lengthy stage-gate reviews, heavy documentation, and multiple sign-offs can stretch development timelines. In fact, back in 2015, a BCG survey reported that overly long development times were the most-cited obstacle to getting returns on innovation, with 42% of global innovation executives saying product development takes too long. If that was true then, it’s even more pressing now. Long cycles not only delay time-to-market; they also increase the odds that market needs will shift before you finish. The faster the world moves, the more dangerous a slow pipeline becomes.
These challenges—resource constraints, busy teams, cultural caution, and slow processes—create a perfect storm that holds innovation back. Companies might have brilliant ideas and talented people, yet they find themselves lagging behind startups or more nimble competitors. The cost of falling behind can be high.
The Cost of Slow Innovation
What happens if you can’t keep up with the pace of innovation? For one, you risk losing relevance. In today’s environment, a company that sticks to “business as usual” for too long can quickly find that the market has moved on without them.
Customer expectations evolve rapidly; a product that was cutting-edge a few years ago might now feel outdated if it hasn’t continually improved. Slow innovation also opens the door for competitors (or upstarts) to leapfrog your offerings. We’ve seen entire industries upended by newcomers who iterate faster and listen to customers more keenly.
There’s also a financial angle: products that arrive late to market miss opportunities and revenue windows. Moreover, operating with old technology or lagging features can erode customer loyalty over time.
Ironically, playing it too safe can be the riskiest move in the long run. In uncertain times, sticking only to incremental improvements can be more dangerous than pursuing bold innovations. The COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, showed that companies could innovate rapidly when forced to—and those that did were often the ones that adapted and survived disruptions.
Failing to accelerate innovation isn’t just a missed opportunity; it can be an existential threat. The good news is that businesses are not powerless against these challenges. By recognizing the roadblocks and taking proactive steps, you can dramatically improve your innovation velocity. Let’s explore some effective strategies to do just that.
How to Accelerate Product Development
Speeding up innovation doesn’t mean throwing discipline out the window. It’s about working smarter and removing friction from the development process. Here are several strategies that leading companies use to pick up the pace:
1. Dedicate Time and Resources to Innovate
If you want innovation to happen, you have to make space for it. This might mean earmarking a portion of the budget specifically for exploratory projects or setting up a small cross-functional “tiger team” focused on new ideas.
Some organizations use the 70-20-10 rule for resource allocation: 70% on core business, 20% on adjacent improvements, and 10% on truly new ventures. Google famously allowed engineers to spend 20% of their time on passion projects—a practice credited with creating Gmail and other breakthroughs. The exact ratio isn’t as important as the principle: ensure that people have time away from the grind of daily tasks to tinker, prototype, and dream.
Managers can also set innovation goals (e.g., number of prototypes developed per quarter, or target percentage of revenue from products less than 3 years old) to signal that new products are a priority. By ring-fencing resources for R&D and innovation, you prevent those resources from being continuously swallowed by immediate needs. This concept is similar to the notion of paying yourself first: invest in your future so it doesn’t get neglected.
This dedicated focus can start small—perhaps one afternoon a week of “innovation time” team-wide, or a modest budget for experimenting with new tech—and grow as you see returns.
2. Foster an Innovation Culture
Culture might sound intangible, but it has very tangible effects on innovation speed. In an environment where team members feel empowered to try new things, ideas flow more freely and projects move faster. Building an innovation-friendly culture starts with leadership. Leaders should communicate that innovation is a core value and back that up with actions: reward teams who take smart risks (even if the project fails), share lessons learned from experiments, and maybe even incorporate innovation metrics into performance reviews.
One practical tip is to celebrate “good fails”. When a team pursues a bold idea and it doesn’t work out, highlight what was learned and recognize the effort. This sends a powerful message that learning matters as much as the outcome.
Some companies hold internal innovation challenges or hackathons to spark creativity. Others establish mentorship programs where experienced innovators coach newer teams on creative problem-solving. The goal is to replace fear with curiosity. When employees aren’t afraid of repercussions, they can engage in rapid experimentation, which is essential for quick innovation. As an example, at Sherpa Design we hold annual Constructors Cup challenges to encourage a culture of innovation.
In an innovation culture, ideas can come from anywhere—and they get a fair hearing. Better yet, cross-pollination between departments is encouraged, breaking down the silos that often slow things. To accomplish this, leadership needs to permeate a top-down ethos that innovation isn’t sporadic but a continuous, supported activity. With the right cultural support, a lot of the bureaucratic drag on development naturally falls away, and teams can iterate much faster.
3. Embrace Agile Development and Design Sprints
Traditional waterfall product development, with its long sequential phases, is ill-suited for today’s fast pace. Instead, agile methodologies and design sprints have become go-to approaches for speed.
Agile, which is used widely in software but increasingly in hardware development too, emphasizes working in short cycles with frequent check-ins and iterations. This means you develop a working prototype or feature quickly, get feedback, and refine it—rather than trying to perfect something in a vacuum for a year. The effect is a much faster learning loop and a product that better fits the market by launch time.
Design sprints are another powerful tool. A design sprint is essentially a focused, week-long (or short-term) push to solve a problem or test a new concept. In a sprint, a small team goes from idea to prototype to user feedback in a matter of days. This can replace months of debating and speculating with actual data and insights.
A well-run sprint can shrink what might be a 6-month project into a one-week experiment, drastically cutting the development calendar while also reducing risk. By the end of the week, you either have validation that an idea is worth pursuing and a clear direction for next steps, or evidence that it’s not viable—in which case you just saved a ton of time by failing fast.
In practice, adopting agile and sprints might involve training your team on new processes or bringing in a facilitator to guide initial sprints. This investment is often worth it. Companies that have embraced agile methods report not just faster delivery, but also higher team morale and better end products.
The key is to iterate in small bites and keep the customer involved throughout, so you’re never going too far down the wrong path. For physical product companies, techniques like rapid prototyping (via technology like 3D printing) are the hardware equivalent of agile, allowing quick build-test cycles. The faster you can cycle through “build > test > learn,” the faster your innovation will reach the finish line.
4. Leverage External Partners (Outsource for Speed)
Sometimes the quickest way to innovate is to get help from the outside. Outsourcing used to be thought of mainly as a cost-saving tactic, but today it’s just as much about speed and flexibility. By partnering with an external design and engineering firm, businesses can jumpstart a project that might otherwise sit in limbo due to lack of internal bandwidth. Outsourcing product design sprints or prototype development is increasingly common for companies big and small.
Why consider an external partner? For one, you gain instant access to specialized expertise and extra hands. If your team is tied up or doesn’t have deep experience in a new technology area, you can bring in experts who do this type of development every day. These partners come with proven workflows and tools, so there’s less trial-and-error.
In fact, outsourcing can accelerate time-to-market by leveraging the external partner’s specialized skills and established processes. Essentially, you’re buying speed. A good engineering partner can take an idea from concept to prototype in a fraction of the time it would take your internal team that’s juggling other duties.
Outsourcing also lets your in-house engineers keep their focus on core products. This avoids the situation we described earlier where new and important ideas get neglected. By outsourcing, your team continues to excel on the current roadmap (so revenue stays healthy), while the external team works in parallel on the new innovation.
It’s a best-of-both-worlds scenario: you maintain momentum on existing products and create momentum on future products. As an added benefit, external teams bring a fresh perspective. They might suggest solutions or features you hadn’t considered, drawing from experiences across different industries.
It’s worth noting that outsourcing doesn’t have to mean offshoring to a distant country (unless you want it to). Many companies choose to partner with local or specialized firms that operate as an extension of their own team. The collaboration can be tightly integrated—think weekly check-ins, shared project management tools, and co-created prototypes. At Sherpa Design, for example, we often serve as a bolt-on R&D team for our clients.
Case in Point: Sprinting with an External Team
To illustrate the impact of an external innovation sprint, consider a recent project we tackled at Sherpa Design. A client had an idea for a handheld thermal rangefinder—a device with a thermal camera and distance-measuring capabilities.
Over a matter of a few weeks, we went from an initial problem statement to a prototype of the device. Our multidisciplinary team (mechanical, electrical, industrial design) handled the research, brainstorming, design, and prototyping in rapid succession. (You can read more about this in our blog post on the Thermal Rangefinder Sprint Project, which details how we turn ideas into working prototypes quickly, acting as an extension of our client’s team.)
This example shows how outsourcing an innovation project can dramatically compress timelines. What might have taken a year of on-and-off effort internally was achieved in a matter of weeks. When done right, partnering with external experts can accelerate speed, reduce risk, and deliver quality results fast.
Quick Tip
If you’re considering outsourcing a product development sprint, look for a partner whose expertise complements your team’s skills and who has a track record in the specific type of product or technology you’re pursuing. Start with a well-defined project (e.g., “develop prototype X in Y weeks”) and clear goals. This ensures everyone is aligned on expectations and you can measure success at the end of the sprint.
5. Streamline Decision Making
A final piece of the puzzle in accelerating innovation is removing organizational bottlenecks. All the R&D budget and agile scrum teams in the world won’t help if every new idea has to climb a mountain of approvals or if pivoting on a project is painfully slow. Take a hard look at your company’s decision-making process for new developments. Is it clear who can greenlight a prototype build or approve a quick pilot run? If not, define a pathway that empowers product managers or innovation leads to make more calls without endless meetings.
Some companies establish an “innovation board”—a small group of senior stakeholders who fast-track promising experiments. Others give project teams more autonomy to make day-to-day decisions, reserving oversight only for major expenditures. The goal is to reduce friction. If an engineer has a cool idea, how fast can that go from sketch to something tangible? If the answer is “weeks or months, due to red tape,” there’s room for improvement. By streamlining processes and clarifying governance for innovation projects, you enable the very speed you’re aiming for.
Additionally, consider adopting a “fail fast” criteria for decision-making. Instead of asking for a perfect business case to approve the exploration of an idea, ask what the smallest experiment would be to validate or invalidate the concept and approve that. This incremental investment approach not only saves time but also conserves resources by filtering out duds early.
Balancing Innovation Speed with Business Stability
Innovation may be moving at breakneck speed in the marketplace, but with the right approaches, your company can keep pace. The challenges slowing down innovation—limited resources, overloaded teams, cautious culture, and clunky processes—are formidable but not insurmountable. By proactively dedicating resources, nurturing a culture that embraces change, adopting agile techniques, and leveraging external partnerships, you can dramatically accelerate product development without burning out your core business.
The takeaway is actionable: identify your bottlenecks and attack them.
Maybe you start small by scheduling an innovation sprint next quarter, or by engaging a firm like Sherpa Design to tackle a prototype that’s been gathering dust in your idea vault. Perhaps you rally your team for a “moonshot meeting” to re-prioritize projects and ensure at least one or two high-potential innovations get the attention they deserve.
Remember, every great product we enjoy today started as a crazy idea at some point—one that only saw the light of day because someone put in the effort and took the risk to develop it. The companies that thrive will be those that can run today’s operations and build tomorrow’s breakthroughs simultaneously.
Don’t let the accelerating train of innovation leave the station without you. With focus, culture, process, and the right partners, you can streamline your product development journey.
Need help accelerating your next product idea? At Sherpa Design, we specialize in guiding companies from concept to prototype at speed—without derailing your ongoing projects. Feel free to explore our resources or reach out to see how we can help on your innovation journey.
