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The Lean Post / Articles / What it Takes to Win at New Product Development: A Conversation with Steve Spear

WLEI Steven Spear

Product & Process Development

What it Takes to Win at New Product Development: A Conversation with Steve Spear

By Lex Schroeder and Steve Spear

April 10, 2025

MIT’s Steve Spear shares what sets winning product development teams apart—from building fast-learning cultures to leading through complexity—and how leaders in hardware and software can learn from each other.

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In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we speak with Steve Spear, a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, senior fellow at the Institute of Healthcare Improvement, and associated faculty member at Adriane Labs of the Harvard School of Public Health. Spear is also author of The High-Velocity Edge and Wiring the Winning Organization and principal of SeeToSolve. 

The conversation explores: 

  • Stellar examples of product development innovation (and the learning cultures that made these achievements possible)
  • What Lean, Six Sigma, Agile, DevOps, and more schools of systems thinking and management all have in common
  • What business and product leaders across hardware and software can learn from each other
  • Key ideas and core principles you should take away from his latest book 
  • What kind of leadership Steve believes is needed now and what good leadership looks like in practice, given all of the organizational challenges companies face today

Resources:

  • View Steve Spear’s MIT Executive Education course Leading Organizations for High Velocity performance here.
  • Read excerpts from The High-Velocity Edge:
    • Chapters 1, 4, & 5
    • Chapter 11 Healthcare
  • Read excerpt from Wiring the Winning Organization.

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Written by:

Lex Schroeder
|Steve Spear

About Lex Schroeder

Lex Schroeder is a strategy and operations leader/writer breaking open new conversations about the future of work. A longtime editor in the systems thinking community, she has led strategic initiatives at The Lean Enterprise Institute and The Berkana Institute. In 2015, she served as Founding Editor and Co-Lead of The…

Read more about Lex Schroeder

About Steve Spear

Steven J. Spear, five-time winner of the Shingo Prize and recipient of the McKinseyAward, is a senior lecturer at MIT and former assistant professor at Harvard. A senior fellow at the Institute for HealthcareImprovement, he is the author of numerous articles appearing in academic and trade publications, including the Harvard BusinessReview and The New York Times.

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