Creating small products at a big company: adobe's "pipeline" innovation process

Pipeline is a new development process at Adobe designed to rapidly prototype and evaluate new product offerings. Pipeline has user research at its core, and success is defined by how much is learned about a given problem, not by how much product is built. Starting ideas for new product directions are identified through Contextual Inquiry. Once a product direction is selected, an iterative process of development and evaluation is carried out over a 13-week period. Opportunities to pivot are built in at 3-week intervals, driven by evaluation results from laboratory studies. The Pipeline process is explained through an example product prototype, called "Gadget". Gadget is an application targeted at Web developers that helps them more easily experiment with and modify the visual layout of a Web page.