Preston G. Smith has been an independent management consultant since 1986 helping manufacturers to bring new products to market faster. He is coauthor of the time-to-market classic,Developing Products in Half the Time. More recently, he has authored Flexible Product Development (Jossey-Bass, 2007), which re-creates the approaches of agile software development to enable the developers of non-software products to enjoy the benefits of an agile process to embrace the inevitable changes that occur in the project environment. Prior to 1986 he held a variety of systems engineering and engineering management positions for twenty years. Preston holds an engineering PhD from Stanford University. Learn more about flexible product development at FlexibleDevelopment.com or reach Preston at preston at NewProductDynamics.com.