I spent a year and a half inside GM back in the mid-1990s performing research for my Ph.D. thesis. I studied how the “voice of the customer” made its way into new product decisions. At that time, it was very hard for anyone to get anything done, because each part of the organization was charged with optimizing a different piece of the puzzle. So, when explaining why they’d decided not to push for a certain feature, people would tell me, “You’ve got to pick your battles.”

Essentially, the designers, marketers, and engineers charged with creating a new product pushed really hard for only a handful of top priorities. Everything else was allowed to slide if manufacturing, finance, or some other group put up resistance.

Problem is, for a product to succeed these days a large number of things must be done right. With the best products, hundreds of details have clearly been thought through.

So my response to “you’ve got to pick your battles” was “if you’ve got to pick your battles, then you’ve already lost the war.” The people working inside competitors’ new product development organizations aren’t picking their battles. They’re focused on the real war, against the competition, and working together to create great products.

Luckily, GM has come a long way since then. I first noticed this with the 2004 Chevrolete Malibu Maxx, which is chock full of the sort of details that would have never made it through the product development organization I observed. The new Saturn Outlook and GMC Acadia demonstrate that GM has continued to improve in this regard.

But they’re still not through the woods. The armrests in the Saturn Aura, with their hard vinyl and fake stitching, would have never made it to production within an organization that was sweating every detail. But this is becoming the exception rather than the rule. And the 2008 Cadillac CTS may be GM’s most thoroughly conceived product to date.