It is unclear whether the common belief that experience benefits new product development performance is driven by decision-makers allocating more attention to success experience or more attention to failure experience. This paper differentiates between the two aforementioned types of experience in order to explore their separate effects on new product development performance. We find that only late-stage failure experience improves performance, that success experience is more beneficial than late-stage failure experience and that, while others’ related failure experience increases the likelihood of failure, others’ related success experience decreases it. We conducted our research in the context of drug development in the biotech industry and obtained our data from Pharma Projects.