Traditional business cases assume 100% success. Instead, use "expected commercial value," which incorporates historical data on project success rates based on factors like market familiarity and technical capability to create realistic financial forecasts.
Voice of the customer research is often insufficient. Adopt iterative innovation by quickly creating and demoing cheap prototypes—even computer simulations or animated concepts—to get constant, early feedback. This validates ideas in real-time.
After four years of failing to define a new product by asking teachers what they wanted, Lego's B2B team finally succeeded when they built and showed them a prototype. This shows that for complex problems, building and demoing is more effective than traditional voice-of-customer interviews.
To solve resource overload, don't compare all projects directly. Categorize them into "buckets" (e.g., bold innovations vs. minor fixes). Then, rank and kill the lowest-performing projects *within* each bucket to reallocate resources effectively and protect bolder initiatives.
To reveal strategic misalignment, create three pie charts for your project buckets (e.g., bold, regular, fixes): number of projects, resource allocation (person-days), and expected first-year sales. A mismatch proves you are putting your "seed on the worst fields."
Agile is not a fix for a broken process. First, apply Lean principles to your existing StageGate system by mapping the value stream and eliminating non-value-added bureaucracy. This alone can yield dramatic improvements, like a 50% reduction in time-to-market.
Success in new products requires two distinct skills: process excellence (doing projects right) and portfolio management (doing the right projects). Most companies have decent processes but are extremely weak at project selection and strategy, which is the bigger lever for success.