Many firms expend a great amount of effort to identify and eliminate waste in their processes. Much recent effort has focused on lean manufacturing. Now lean product development has become a goal as well. Yet, in product development, determining how and when value is added is problematic. The goal of a product development process is to produce a product “recipe” that satisfies requirements. Design work is done both to specify the recipe in increasing detail and to verify that it does in fact conform to requirements. As design work proceeds, certainty increases surrounding the ability of the evolving product (and production process) design specifications to be the final product recipe (i.e., performance risk decreases). The goal of this paper is to advance the theory and practice of evaluating progress and added value in complex system product development. The paper proposes that making progress and adding value (to the customer) in complex system product development equate with producing useful information that reduces performance risk. The paper also contributes a methodology—the risk value method—that integrates current approaches such as technical performance measure (TPM) tracking charts and risk waterfall charts.