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Have you ever thought about the cycle that develops new children’s toys? This is an excellent avenue to learn about product development and project management in general, taking lessons to apply to your own business.
First, most commercial children’s toys are built off of consumer group surveys and focus group testing. Given the amount of money that goes into manufacturing the toys, the manufacturers need some defensible position for why it will sell, and focus group testing is one way of determining, before the development process starts, what the consumers will want.
This is, incidentally, the reason why most children’s toys are tied heavily into branding and cartoons. Kids watch cartoons, kids who watch cartoons will tell their parents about the cartoons they want, and then they’ll throw temper tantrums if they don’t get the toy or game.
So, ultimately, toys are about tie ins to media properties. It’s a very rare toy indeed that manages to make it to the market without this sort of interactivity with the marketing process. (And if you’re a parent, and don’t recall it being this bad when you were a kid, consumer surveys show that the line between children’s television programming and commercials has blurred consistently since the late 1980s.)
Once a consumer want has been identified, a good toy manufacturer looks into what it will take to get the toy into production, and makes an estimate for how long the toy will remain marketable. While some toys (like Tickle Me Elmo) are evergreens, able to sell repeatedly, year in, year out, others are tied to very specific fads (like Pokemon, or Care Bears), which have a very distinct shelf life – Pokemon, while still on the air, is nowhere near the pop culture phenomena it was in the late 1990s. Care Bears now sell to the nostalgia set, but not to new children.
Project management comes into play in determining how rapidly the toy can be brought to market at what price, and how to capitalize on the time window of the fad in question – advertising campaigns, placement at Wal Mart and toy stores, seasonal variations, all are important strategic considerations to the prospects of bringing a toy to market.
Finally, once the toy is developed, it needs to go through consumer product safety testing. This is one reason why a lot of "doll toys" are nearly identical to the 50 year old Barbie and Ken dolls – the testing regimen for bringing a simple variant of either of these toys to market is shorter, and less expensive, than bringing a brand new toy to market.
And, somewhere close to 90% of the toys proposed never make it to market. The slots for production are tightly contested by the major toy manufacturers. Ironically, the best place to showcase an innovative toy idea is gearing it towards the adult market.
The lessons learned from this practical project management training are that successful product (and by correlation, business) launches work from known consumer wants with a tight appreciation for the timeliness factors involved, with a fixed budget of working hours and resources and dollars.
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