The New Product Bet
by Nils Rudi and Serguei Netessine

This book is a multimedia approach to teaching how to choose order quantities for new, high margin products with long leadtimes. The book is supposed to accompany an app that has videos and other multimedia to reinforce the lessons. My review is only about the book part of the package. The writeup and accompanying illustrations of the newsvendor problem, along with suggested efforts to gather demand information and/or shorten leadtimes, were very good. It would be a great introduction to the topic for a new student or product manager. The length (about 140 pages with lots of illustrations, maybe the equivalent of 50 pages of normal text) was also short enough to be easily digested by its target audience.

I am not sure what stage this book is in. Serguei brought a bunch of unfinished versions to one of his presentations at INFORMS 2016 and left them for the audience. There are still some passages/charts unfinished in my version, and I did not have a password to try out the multimedia sections of the book. In googling, the book does not seem to be for sale yet, and the picture above is my own. I hope it gets published soon.