Organizing for Product Development
Let's look at four approaches to organizing for product development. First, the traditional
U.S. approach to product development is an organization with distinct departments: a
research and development department to do the necessary research; an engineering department
to design the product; a manufacturing engineering department to design a product that
can be produced; and a production department that produces the product. The distinct advantage
of this approach is that fixed duties and responsibilities exist. The distinct disadvantage
is lack of forward thinking: How will downstream departments in -the process deal with the
concepts, ideas, and designs presented to them, and ultimately what will the customer think of
the product?
A second and popular approach is to assign a product manager to "champion" the product
through the product development system and related organizations. However, a third, and
perhaps the best, product development approach used in the U.S. seems to be the use of teams.