How Long Does It Take to Complete a New Product Blueprinting Project?

The short answer is about three to eight months.

That is a fairly wide range, but there is a good reason for it. The elapsed time for a New Product Blueprinting project depends much less on the methodology itself than on how efficiently the team moves through the work—especially project scoping, customer recruiting, interview preparation, and the quality of the work produced along the way.

A well-scoped project with an engaged team, accessible customers, and strong Desired Outcomes can move surprisingly quickly. A project that requires substantial rescoping, struggles to schedule customers, or needs to redo portions of the work will naturally take longer.

The factors below generally have the greatest impact on project duration.

1. How Well the Project Is Scoped at the Outset

This is usually the most important factor.

Before beginning customer research, the team needs to be clear about exactly what it intends to learn and from whom. A strong project scope begins with the job-to-be-done that will be studied, but several other dimensions also need to be considered.

These can include:

• The scope of innovation—for example, whether the team is exploring a new-to-the-world opportunity or improving an existing product.
• The customer context in which the job is performed.
• The product category being investigated.
• The geographies that are in or out of scope.
• The customer or persona types to be included.
• Other important boundaries that define which customers, applications, situations, or markets belong in the study.

The objective is not to define the solution before beginning the project. It is to make sure the team is studying a sufficiently clear and coherent customer problem.

When teams discover partway through a project that their original scope was incorrect, too broad, too narrow, or contained meaningfully different customer populations, they may need to revisit work they have already completed. Interviews may no longer be relevant, Desired Outcomes may need to be reconsidered, and additional customers may need to be recruited.

That lost time can be substantial.

Getting the scope right at the beginning is one of the best things a team can do to shorten the overall project.

2. How Long It Takes to Set Up Discovery Interviews

Once the scope is established, the next major variable is usually customer recruiting and scheduling.

Discovery Interviews are where the team develops a rich understanding of customers' needs, so there is no substitute for getting the right customers into the process. But the time required to arrange these interviews can vary considerably.

Several things influence the schedule.

Number of Discovery Interviews

A project requiring more interviews will naturally take longer to schedule and conduct than one requiring fewer.

Onsite Versus Virtual Interviews

Virtual interviews are generally easier to schedule because they eliminate travel and make it possible to conduct interviews with geographically dispersed customers.

Onsite interviews can provide important advantages in some projects—particularly when observing customers in their environment is useful—but travel logistics can add elapsed time.

Ease of Customer Access

Some teams have close relationships with customers who are happy to participate. Others work in markets where customers are difficult to reach, highly regulated, extremely busy, or simply less willing to devote time to research.

The strength of the company's customer relationships can therefore have a major impact on the project schedule.

Team Diligence

Perhaps most importantly, customer recruiting needs to be treated as an active project responsibility.

Teams that begin recruiting immediately, follow up consistently, use multiple recruiting channels when necessary, and keep a steady pipeline of potential interviewees moving tend to progress much faster.

Teams that approach recruiting intermittently can lose weeks without realizing it.

3. The Quality of the Desired Outcomes Produced During Discovery

Another major factor is the quality of the Desired Outcomes generated through Discovery Interviews.

A team does not merely need to conduct Discovery Interviews. It needs to translate what it learns into well-written Desired Outcome statements that can be used in the next stage of the process.

When those statements are written correctly as the interviews are being conducted, the team can typically move directly toward Preference Interviews.

When they are not, the project may need to pause while the Desired Outcomes are reviewed and rewritten.

This problem most often occurs when a team has not yet fully absorbed the skill of writing strong Desired Outcomes. For example, team members may not have fully internalized the technique during training, may not have worked closely enough with their AIM coach, or may not have completed the recommended e-learning.

The result can be a large collection of statements that need significant cleanup before the project can continue.

Because Desired Outcomes form the foundation for Preference Interviews and subsequent analysis, this is not a step that should be rushed.

A little additional effort learning to write them correctly during Discovery usually saves considerable time later.

4. How Quickly the Team Sets Up Preference Interviews

Preference Interviews allow the team to determine which customer outcomes are most important and where customers are dissatisfied with their ability to achieve them.

Here again, recruiting discipline matters.

One of the most effective approaches is to begin thinking about Preference Interview participants while Discovery Interviews are still underway. In many cases, recruiting for the two phases can overlap.

Teams that wait until every Discovery activity is complete before beginning Preference Interview recruiting may unintentionally create another gap in the project schedule.

The goal should be to maintain momentum from one phase into the next.

5. The Team's Overall Pace and Engagement

Projects also accumulate time through dozens of smaller delays.

Individually, these may seem insignificant. Collectively, they can turn a four-month project into a seven- or eight-month project.

Common examples include:

• Team meetings being postponed or canceled.
• Long gaps between project working sessions.
• Team members taking several days or weeks to complete agreed-upon actions.
• Slow responses to questions or recommendations from the AIM coach.
• Difficulty finding times when all key team members can participate.
• Vacations, business travel, product launches, budgeting cycles, or other company priorities interrupting the project.
• Changes in team membership that require bringing new participants up to speed.
• Waiting too long to review interview notes or refine Desired Outcomes after an interview.
• Delaying decisions that are necessary for the next stage of the project.

This is one reason elapsed project time and actual work effort are not the same thing. A project may not require eight months of continuous work, but several small pauses can easily stretch the calendar.

6. Whether the Team Keeps Activities Moving in Parallel

The fastest teams do not necessarily work harder. They often work more efficiently.

Whenever possible, they avoid treating the project as a completely sequential series of activities.

For example:

• Additional Discovery Interviews can be scheduled while earlier interviews are being analyzed.
• Desired Outcomes can be refined as they are generated rather than waiting until every Discovery Interview is finished.
• Preference Interview recruiting can begin before the Discovery phase is completely closed.
• Team members can prepare for upcoming activities while other work is being completed.

Maintaining this kind of forward momentum can remove weeks from the overall schedule without compromising the quality of the research.

7. The Complexity of the Market Being Studied

Some projects are simply more complicated than others.

A narrowly defined market with a relatively homogeneous customer population may progress quickly. A project involving multiple customer types, applications, buying roles, geographies, or use environments may require more care.

Likewise, a highly exploratory project aimed at a new-to-the-world innovation may create more learning—and therefore more questions—than an incremental project in a market the company already understands well.

That additional learning is often extremely valuable. But teams should recognize that greater complexity may require additional time.

So, What Should a Team Plan For?

For planning purposes, three to eight months is a reasonable expectation for most New Product Blueprinting projects.

A project is more likely to finish toward the shorter end of that range when:

• The scope is well defined from the beginning.
• Customers are relatively easy to recruit.
• The team schedules interviews aggressively.
• Desired Outcomes are written correctly during Discovery.
• Preference Interview recruiting begins early.
• Team members complete project work promptly.
• Meetings occur consistently.
• The team stays closely engaged with its AIM coach.

Projects move toward the longer end of the range when one or more of those conditions are absent.

The important point is that project duration is not predetermined. Teams have considerable influence over it.

In fact, one of the strongest predictors of how quickly a New Product Blueprinting project progresses is simply whether the team maintains momentum. When the scope is right, customers are continually moving through the recruiting pipeline, work is reviewed quickly, and the team remains actively engaged, the process can move very efficiently.

And while completing the project quickly is valuable, speed is not the ultimate objective. The goal is to develop the customer understanding needed to make better product decisions.

The best teams therefore focus on moving quickly without skipping the learning that makes New Product Blueprinting valuable in the first place.