Book: Product development- work for premium values

This a recent book from Sten Jonsson which describes the social interaction and processes in development team in Volvo Cars. An highly reliable and empirically based book.

Synopsis
This book is about how teams can keep value-driven product development together and focused in spite of complex organizational settings and changing brand values. Through good leadership, and good team spirit, large projects can maintain their dynamism if people "talk their walk" and thereby coproduce a good story - a story good enough to tell the customer. We will see, increasingly, the story of how the new car model was developed as part of marketing efforts. The brand values, embedded in the story of the heroic efforts made by the project team to accomplish this valuable product, serve as criteria when members choose what solution to propose to the design problems at hand. The good story will visualise the brand values at the same time as it stages the product. The narrative can be a management tool! Yes, we need the bureaucratic structures (target costing, cost reviews, quality assurance) to keep projects within reasonable limits, but those trappings do not create value, nor does an old specification of a product in a changing world. This book provides an implicit attack on the idea of gate systems so prevalent in the academic literature on product development.