Today's new product development (NPD) processes are under increasing pressure to reduce the cycle time to bring products to market. This is reflected in the need to rapidly assess the technology in terms of its maturation and staging in order to implement it in new products. Premature productization of a new technology, by contrast, can cause serious collateral damage to overall project schedules and project spends if risks are not clearly understood. Time, money, and engineering effort may be wasted on building product prototypes that end up not fully working or meeting critical specs. There may be insufficient time for problem solving because of the need to feed the beast (meet prototype build commitments). Potential recognition of show stopping issues may occur late in the process resulting in the need to reset or recycle steps in the design. As a result the costs and schedule become unpredictable. At Xerox Direct Marketing Group, we have implemented a readiness assessment tool first developed by NASA in 1974 called the Technology Readiness Level. Our implantation, which uses only the first four levels of the process, has had significant benefits for us. Throughout 2010 we piloted this idea in two major product development projects which used this methodology to manage technology risk. Both projects were staffed at lower levels than historical norms, and both projects met their technology demonstration milestones (as an integrated system) with no surprises and very little or no schedule slip. In this talk we present an overview of the process, our specific implementation and the benefits of implementing such a process.