Agile Innovation in a Manufacturing Company: How Tetra Pak Evolved Its Product Development Process

OVERVIEW: The article explains how Tetra Pak, a global manufacturing company, revamped its product development process (PDP) by transitioning from the traditional Stage-Gate model to a new innovative process that integrates Agile, Lean, Stage-Gate, the Scaled Agile Framework for enterprises (SAFe), and systems engineering methods. The design and implementation of the PDP at Tetra Pak offers insights into how this new process enhances quality, increases throughput, and improves the management of complex engineering products with substantial hardware content. It also highlights valuable lessons from the transformation journey. We present lessons learned that innovation managers and practitioners can apply to accelerate their companies’ product development processes. This article focuses primarily on the new product development (NPD) process, with less emphasis on the transformation methodology and the change management process.