Create a rollout plan
Once he knows which ideas he’s going to implement, then Sinnott works with his teams to create a product road map. All of the information gathered in the idea evaluation process helps with that task.
“When you lay all these criteria out, the road map almost builds itself,” Sinnott says.
His road map looks out three years and shows what Mannatech will launch, at what times and in what countries.
“You need to know what you’re shooting for years in advance,” Sinnott says.
Typically, Sinnott and his team launch 65 to 70 products a year; however, they serve 16 countries, so divide that across all of those locations, and it typically works out to just a few launches per year in each country.
“You want to space them out so you have good development time and you’ve also got not too many products coming out at once,” he says. “It takes a lot of analysis, so behind that simple piece of paper is actually thousands of pages of documents where we’re analyzing and figuring out the right time to launch these, and we’re allocating resources and budgets.”
When he’s launching a blockbuster product, he does so at a major event, such as a national convention. Minor products get less fanfare.
“You have to always keep it fresh, and then at the same time, remember that the consumer can only digest so much at one time, so really, if you dumped out too many products at one particular time, you diminish the impact,” Sinnott says. “It’s better to deliver fewer than a lot.”
While you have to keep people excited by rolling out new products, you can’t move too fast. Sinnott typically spends about 18 months developing any given product before it’s launched.
“That’s the balancing act,” he says. “You can’t take forever because people’s preferences change pretty rapidly, but also, you can’t take shortcuts or else you’ll end up with a defective product, as Toyota found out.”
Don’t be afraid to adjust your product development process. Mannatech is currently on its fourth version.
“They call this the product development pipeline because ideas go in one end and they get processed, and products come out the other end. It’s just building it just like if you’re building an oil pipeline,” he says. “What you do is you design the segments, and you kind of weld them together, and then you pressure test it. What you do is you run a few products through and you find out where the leaks are. Where did you run into development issues? Where was the actual timeline not matching theory? And then you fix the spots where it’s broken, and the more you run it, the next time it leaks less, and then the next time you run it, it doesn’t leak at all, and then the next time you run it, you realize, ‘Hey, you know what? We need a bigger pipe, so you expand it.”
It all comes down to taking the time to create the process.
“My grandmother gave me a lot of advice, but one piece that really stuck in my head that I’ve followed ever since is it takes less time to do something right than to explain why you didn’t,” he says.
Taking this approach has helped Mannatech launch products more efficiently and successfully and has positioned the company for future success.
“If you’re in touch with your consumers and you truly know them and you’re communicating with them and you know what it is they want, then it’s simple,” Sinnott says. “You just need to find out what they want and make a good quality product, and then you can’t fail. When we do that, when we apply that simple two-step formula of finding out what they want and building it with the highest quality, those products have been a success.”
HOW TO REACH: Mannatech Inc., (972) 471-7400 or www.mannatech.com
