Word: producting
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...Kraft in May 2003 to stop it from marketing Oreos to elementary school students. The suit drew hoots of derision from tort reformers, even though Joseph withdrew it days later, after Kraft announced it would banish trans fats from the Oreo and then committed to doing so across its product lines. It has succeeded in converting 73% of its cookies and crackers, including Triscuits. But so far, the Oreo project has put on store shelves only low-fat, sugar-free and "golden" varieties of the cookie, which taste nothing like the original, which is still sold. Kraft says...
Kraft isn't alone in having suffered technical difficulties. Food giant ConAgra, which successfully produces trans-fat-free margarine spreads, has found stick margarine an intractable challenge. And trans-fat-free pie crusts, says director of product development Patricia Verduin, were as dense and chewy "as wonton wrappers." After 18 months, ConAgra has managed to strip several of its products of the offending fats, most notably its Kid Cuisine line. The customer response? Not a word. "The best reaction," notes Verduin, "is no reaction...
...only about 14% are likely to actively avoid them. Charlie Lousignont, an executive at Fazoli's restaurant chain, based in Lexington, Ky., which cut trans fats from most of its menu last April, points out that consumers tend to make choices based on taste, not virtue. "The ultimate food product," he says, "is low in calories, carbohydrates and sodium and has no trans fats. That leaves you with only a handful of things--like a carrot." Someday he might be able to add to that Spartan menu a reformulated Oreo...
There are two lessons to be drawn from that story: one about collaboration, one about control. Apple employees talk incessantly about what they call "deep collaboration" or "cross-pollination" or "concurrent engineering." Essentially it means that products don't pass from team to team. There aren't discrete, sequential development stages. Instead, it's simultaneous and organic. Products get worked on in parallel by all departments at once--design, hardware, software--in endless rounds of interdisciplinary design reviews. Managers elsewhere boast about how little time they waste in meetings; Apple is big on them and proud of it. "The historical...
...lame, and that may, increasingly, be the winning approach. The iPod proved that design and ease of use are at least as important as increased functionality, and the iTunes Music Store proved that goes for smoothly integrating physical devices with online services too. "I think the definition of product has changed over the decades," observes Tony Fadell, vice president of engineering in the iPod division, who played a key role in conceiving and building the first iPod. "The product now is the iTunes Music Store and iTunes and the iPod and the software that goes on the iPod...