The need for product development (hyper) speed is paramount. The average time to design a new car has fallen from 4 years to less than 2 years. Zara is able to mimic a runway design and get it to store shelves in 4-6 weeks. Ultra fast fashion is now eating fast fashion. To survive in this fast-eats-the-slow world, CEOs, operations and product development leaders are in a race to be the first to market, or a fast follower, or at least be in the race to be the third.
Thanks to abundance of paid advice from management consultants and free advice (including this one) on the Internet you cannot fault CEOs, operations and product leaders for being thoroughly confused about what they should do to improve product development speed. Thankfully, for serious product development related to things that have to work and perform reliably for a long period of time, the choice usually narrows down to Waterfall, Phase-gate, Concurrent Engineering, and more recently Agile development.