In 2026, businesses, especially cross-border e-commerce and boutique manufacturing companies, will face many challenges.
Traffic costs are getting higher and higher, and price wars are fierce. Launching “hot” new products seems to be the only way out, but new product development is full of difficulties.
There is a cross-border e-commerce boss Mr. Li who makes smart wearable products. The company has about 100 people and is equipped with the conditions to integrate research, production and sales. The response speed should be very fast in theory.
However, Mr. Li suffered from severe “explosion anxiety”.
Last year, they focused on the pet smart collar track, and the market data and user portraits were well analyzed. Mr. Li asked the design department and sales department to come up with products within three months to catch up with the peak sales season of pet products in Europe and the United States.
But the results were unsatisfactory.
In pursuit of perfection, the design department went through more than a dozen drafts of the ID design, and the functional definitions were repeatedly scrutinized, but the samples never felt amazing enough.
The sales department was as anxious as an ant on a hot pot, and the heads of the two departments almost came to blows during the meeting.
The design director believes that sales do not understand aesthetics, while the sales director feels that when the design department’s “artwork” comes out, the market opportunity will be gone.
In the end, it took five months for the product to be launched reluctantly, missing its best sales period, causing a backlog of inventory, and becoming a cannon fodder product.
Mr. Li reviewed and found that the assessment goals of the design department and the sales department did not overlap in the development of popular products. This kind of internal friction is a common problem for growing small and medium-sized enterprises.
In fact, under the traditional departmental assessment system, cross-departmental “incremental innovation” projects are almost destined to fail.
For the design department, the investment in making popular products is high and may not be successful. Failure will affect the KPI. If it succeeds, it has nothing to do with the incremental profits. For the sales department, it will take time to cooperate with uncertain new products, and the core task is to sell existing mature products.
Therefore, both departments have chosen the path that is most beneficial to them. This is not the fault of the employees, but a problem of the mechanism.
However, there are also successful cases.
A tea packaging company in Fujian, with an annual output value of 90 million and more than 80 people, also faced the dilemma of the design department and the sales department looking down on each other.
Later, the OP partner mechanism was introduced to target the incremental business of “new product development”.
Specific operations include setting up a hot-selling commando team, drawing backbones from the design department and sales department to form a new product project team, with the design person in charge serving as the product manager, and the sales person in charge serving as the marketing manager; clarifying the distribution of benefits, and the company and the project team signing an agreement, and the project team can allocate the incremental gross profit after the new product is launched according to the agreed proportion; defining the boundaries of authority and responsibility, the design team is responsible for product development and proofing, and the sales team is responsible for market research, channel promotion and customer feedback; emphasizing the four principles of incremental growth, not existing stock, no equity, no risk, and flexible exit.
Once this mechanism is activated, the effect is remarkable.
In the past, designers completed the design and handed over work, but now they will actively follow sales to visit customers and participate in exhibitions. In the past, sales felt that the design department was slow and did not understand the market, but now they will actively provide market data and other information to help designers.
As a result, this “hot product commando” developed 4 new products in a row within 6 months, one of which became an annual hot product, and a single product contributed 8 million in sales.
During the year-end dividend payment, the project team received an incremental profit bonus of RMB 350,000, and the backbone of the design department received more than RMB 60,000 per person.
The OP partnership mechanism is designed to make the pie bigger, and is a golden partner with the KSF model.
KSF solves the problem of efficient operation of existing business, and OP solves the problem of innovation in developing incremental markets.
This mechanism is friendly to small and medium-sized enterprise owners, has controllable risks, precise incentives, and can automatically drive teams.
In the “grow or die” era of 2026, companies must find mechanisms to stimulate creativity and collaboration within teams. The OP partner mechanism turns employees into active value creators and business partners by sharing incremental profits.
