Companies discover the costliest product development mistakes too late

The race to bring new products to market quickly has only intensified. But in the pursuit of speed, development teams often make the most important decisions before risk and regulatory experts join the process. The result is delays, costly changes and, in the worst cases, solutions that the company then has to abandon.

Companies usually know the requirements but fail to translate them into concrete product decisions early enough. This applies not only to traditional compliance requirements, but also to operational dependencies, supplier risks and changes to the business model. The risk function therefore ends up reviewing a solution that should have looked different from the outset.

More companies are therefore adopting a shift-left approach. They bring risk and regulatory considerations into the development process earlier, allowing experts to help shape the product instead of merely reviewing it at the end.

This allows the team to consider customer needs, regulatory requirements and business risks together and ask early on: Will the solution work in practice? Can the company use it at scale? Does it meet the requirements? And which risks are we willing to accept?

The crucial shift is to make risk management part of the design process. Experts do not simply identify problems, they help refine the ideas and assumptions that guide the team’s work.

When documentation requirements change the solution

A product team at a financial services company, for example, wanted to make it easier for new customers to sign up digitally. Only late in the process did the team discover that the solution failed to meet customer due diligence and documentation requirements. It therefore had to redesign key elements, delaying the launch and reducing the expected benefits.

Had the team understood the requirements from the outset, it could have incorporated them without compromising the customer experience. The case shows why compliance should shape the solution from the beginning instead of serving as a final check.

When teams understand the parameters, they can also act faster. They know which risks they may accept and when to involve senior leaders. This means they do not have to wait for approval every time they need to make a decision.

It also brings difficult trade-offs to light while the team can still change the solution such as customer experience versus compliance, speed versus resilience, and short-term gains versus long-term sustainability.

It is a leadership choice

Shift-left only works when leaders give risk and regulatory experts influence over early decisions and provide development teams with clear decision-making parameters. This does not create more bureaucracy. It creates fewer surprises, less rework and better products.

The question is therefore not whether companies should consider risk earlier in product development. It is whether leaders will allow that knowledge to shape the product while there is still time to make a difference.

This article was first published in Finans in Danish.