The New New Product Development Game

The HBR article that introduced the "rugby" metaphor for product development — overlapping phases, shared responsibility, the whole team moving down the field together — which Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber would later crystallise as Scrum. Takeuchi and Nonaka studied Japanese companies (Fuji-Xerox, Honda, Canon, NEC) and described a pattern that had emerged there: not the sequential relay of specifications handed off between departments, but overlapping self-organising teams with ambiguous goals and high autonomy. Reading it today is illuminating for two reasons: the practice they describe is more demanding than the lightweight Scrum that inherited its label, and its roots in Japanese management culture explain why it often degrades in translation. Required reading on how contemporary product organisations took their shape.