Success in manufacturing relies on the ability of the product team to create products that resonate with the consumer. Traditionally, companies have focused on product-centric goals, investing heavily to identify products and features that meet the customer's needs.
Staying competitive in your market requires regular updates to your products. As your suppliers and R&D teams come up with exciting solutions to customer needs as new modules, as a product manager, you want to see these innovations on your products to get the value to the market as soon as possible.
Every product manager knows they must meet their target audience's needs to succeed. However, they also know that while consumers may ask for a laptop computer, not all their needs will be the same. For example, a customer who loves to play online games will value a powerful CPU and pay more for a smooth experience, while a college student majoring in the arts will value a lightweight model that doesn't add bulk to their stuffed bag. They only need their laptop for general use, and they will not pay more for additional speed or memory.
With the increasing number of products introducing software components and the constant appetite for new customer features, many companies are looking to adopt Lean-Agile approaches for product development to stay competitive. Many resources out there help lead companies towards Lean-Agile approaches, such as the SAFe Framework, which helps companies of all sizes make Lean-Agile methods work for them, no matter the scale of production. But adopting any new method also requires a shift in mindset. Here are five mindset shifts to help product managers confidently make the switch.
Developing new products that customers love is a challenge but a rewarding one when your team gets it right. Moving from the initial idea to the production and release of the product requires strategy and some type of framework. In product development, a company can take choose from a handful of approaches to build and develop new products. The most commonly used approaches include stage-gate, agile, and hybrid systems. This article will delve into these three methods and determine where they are most suitable.
In the product development world, there are various opinions on Agile Philosophy. Should organizations use it? Does it work for manufacturing complex products? Is it scalable for large companies?
In today's technology-driven world, the products we use every day are an increasingly complex mix of software and hardware components. Developing these modern products requires multiple resources, including personnel and components, to build them; systems engineering is the process that brings these different resources together to create a finished product. Product managers must be in tune with systems engineering so they can navigate the many challenges of modern product development.
One of the biggest lessons that product managers learn is that their roadmaps are not set in stone. You can create a product roadmap with the relevant phases and plans, set the milestone timelines, and share access with all stakeholders. However, roadmaps still require continuous management and regular updates. These updates must also be shared with the relevant teams working on each product to inform everyone of the product strategy and prevent operational silos.
The Stage-Gate methodology has become widely used since it was first introduced as a system in the 1980s. Many companies were using pieces of the puzzle already and found it both easy and exciting to have a system to follow and launch more products successfully. As with any industry, time brings innovation and changes that require methodologies to update and adapt to them. Does the stage gate process for product development remain strong after nearly forty years? Let's discuss the state of the Stage-Gate process and whether manufacturers should still use it.
Very few products stay the same year to year, let alone decade to decade. The components, materials, and designs change and evolve. Sometimes, this is due to consumer demand or innovation; other times, it results from resource shortages or supply changes. When a product team knows in advance that a certain component will no longer be available, this is called phasing out.
