What is Front-Loading?

A company’s success is in large part due to its market timing and how fast it adapts to market changes. To adapt quickly you must be efficient in your development. However, it's important to get a head start since innovation often takes time.

Efficient development is built on having as much knowledge as possible about the new innovation before committing to the customer. Maximizing efficiency means minimizing looping back to fix unanticipated problems during development. Front-loading is the term for building knowledge in an early stage with the aim to eliminate any loop backs in the development process, and therefore reducing both risks and costs.

You invest in building knowledge and experiences as early as possible to reduce risks and increase speed later in the development pipeline. The closer you are to launching a new offering, the more investments you make. It could be manufacturing equipment or sales resources, and any late changes will have high costs and could jeopardize the entire market introduction. The more knowledge gaps you have closed before committing to price, features and launch date, the smaller the risk.

Early knowledge makes it easier to challenge the market’s demands from the sales segments. This also increases the competitiveness of the new offering by being better adjusted to what is actually valued by the customers.

Speed is the key 

Growth is a top priority for every CEO and growth is supported by competitive offerings. There are existing businesses and new businesses to grow within. In existing businesses, you usually “play not to lose” and focus on cost reductions and upgrades of existing offerings. Even though the activities during this phase can be planned, speed is the key. Front-loading will improve, as well as increase, knowledge about ways to improve the portfolio of concepts and thereby speed up improvements by being able to choose the improvement concepts with the best fit. 

Simultaneously, front-loading will help with ruling out false positives which you otherwise would have invested time and money in, just to get the exact same result, later on in development. The existing businesses are almost like a chess game where you can evaluate many different actions and also reactions from the markets. The goal with front-loading is to build multiple tested and risk evaluated options for the company to put into the implementation pipeline. 

A range of tested different options to choose from make it easier and faster to react to customers’ needs and increase certainty to meet promised deadlines. In other words, you want a portfolio of concepts to choose from. 

“Play to win” 

In new markets you must “play to win” and focus on deliver new offerings to existing customers or to new customers/markets. Usually, you can’t plan these activities, instead you must be prepared to identify and convert them as they appear. Front-loading means that you must be open to new ideas/insights and experiment with them to learn if they are valuable enough to implement. This is more like a “poker game” in which you have to bet to learn more. To discover if the offering has what it takes to be the winning hand you have to bet to see how the other players react. 

Sometimes you may have to fold, nevertheless if you don’t bet at all you have no chance of winning. Every offering has a “best before date” and will sooner or later be a commodity. 

This is where you can create a new “S-curve” which is essential for long term survival for every company.