Product development (PD) is a broad field of endeavor dealing with the planning, design, creation, and
marketing of a new product. This revolutionary research domain has become of paramount importance
to beat the competition for multidisciplinary products which are larger in size and have a longer
development time. The main focus of this article is to exploit lean thinking concepts in order to manage,
improve and develop the product faster while improving or at least maintaining the level of performance
and quality. Lean thinking concepts encompass a board range of tools and methods intended to produce
bottom line results however, value stream mapping (VSM) method is used to explore the wastes,
inefficiencies, non-valued added steps in a single, definable process out of complete product development
process (PDP). This single step is highly complex and occurs once while the PDP lasts for 3–5 years.
A case study of gas turbine product has been discussed to illustrate and justify the use of proposed
framework. In order to achieve this, the following have been performed: First of all a current state map is
developed using the Gemba walk. Furthermore, Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) brainstormed to explore
the wastes and their root causes found during the Gemba walk and current state mapping. A future state
map is also developed with removing all the wastes/inefficiencies. Besides numerous intangible benefits,
it is expected that the VSM framework will help the development teams to reduce the PD lead-time
by 50%.