Technology Program Manager for New Product Development, GE

>> Yes, my name is John Legado [assumed spelling]. I'm an engineer by trade with General Electric. I'm actually working in new product development as a program manager at this point. Yeah, essentially, we launch the products for the corporation, so I'm given a budget and assemble a team together. And we work to manage that team. We manage the schedule and manage the product development right through to launch, product launch on the manufacturing facilities. My portion of the business actually works on electrical distribution equipment, so everything from the medium voltage world down to the power panel or switchboard in your basement. So basically, everything between the circuit breakers, the transformers, invertors, all the power stuff in between, we take care of that. Busy day, essentially, it can be a free for all. I generally get in in the morning. I set out ten things I definitely want to get done by the end of the day. Sometimes I might have three or four of those done because things come up during the course of the day. I'm always constantly doing different things in terms of facilitating, fixing problems, working around obstacles. Things come up in development that you don't expect. That's why it's called development. So the exciting thing for me is kind of bringing all that together and making it work. No day is the same. And depending on where you're at in the product development, it could be -- you know, you might be in the early stages where you're designing stuff. You might be in the later stages where you're actually doing certifications with certifying authorities like Underwriter's Laboratories, et cetera, but essentially, just very busy, you know? And it's a lot of fun that way. Essentially, we go through a planning process every year, annually. In fact, we're just coming out of it right now. Budgets are allocated for new business developments. That budget is then turned over to the new product development team to work on, and we figure out what we need from a tooling standpoint, from a resource standpoint, a finance standpoint, and pull that together and start working on it. Now, when we get into product development, we actually work through a staged process. We call it a tollgate process. Okay? So in the early stages, we go through a -- what we used to call decision point one stage, where we say, okay, we've got a design. We think it's going to work. Let's spend the money. We commit. The business commits the money. At a tollgate two, we then turn around. We say we've got a design that works, okay, and we want to proceed. And here's -- we've locked down our budget. We've locked down our schedule, and this is when the business can anticipate that we're going to finish the product. Okay, at tollgate three, you are then already through your pilot production. You've kind of worked out all the kinks. You've got your certification. You say, hey, business, I'm ready to launch the product. And at that point, the product gets launched. Tollgate four resurfaces at the end to say, okay, six months later, how did we do? How did we do on schedule? How did we do on finance? What do the sales look like compared to what we forecasted? Make sure that everything comes together, and many times, there are lessons learned in terms of, hey, we didn't quite plan this out properly, and this is what we can do better the next time. Or we did a great job. This is what we need to carry forward and have our other teams do also. So it goes full circle. Those projects can span anywhere from as little as six months to, you know, four or five years, depending on the scale of the program itself.