A Guide to Engineering Product Development

When building a house, the architect and the construction crew have different skill sets and responsibilities. One drafts a blueprint based on the homeowner’s needs, while the other lays the foundation and frames the walls.

The same concept applies to product development and engineering. These two functions combine high-level strategy with practical execution, enabling companies to launch competitive products faster and more cost-effectively.

Let’s explore the differences between product development and product engineering before diving deeper into the stages, responsibilities, and challenges that teams face.

Product development vs. Product engineering

Product development and engineering product development work toward the same goal but have two distinct functions:

• Product development strives to answer the “who” and “why” of a new product to guide the entire development process
• Product engineering answers the “how,” designing and building the product itself

Product development

Product development is the broader of the two terms, describing the overarching product design process, including everything from market research and ideation to engineering and deployment. This aligns business strategy with market demands, ensuring the final product delivers maximum value to end users and maximizes returns for the business.

Product engineering

Product engineering is about executing the vision outlined in earlier stages of the product development lifecycle. It involves creating detailed design concepts and translating them into concrete requirements, before going through the prototyping process, many rounds of testing, manufacturing, and beyond

4 stages in the engineering product development process

Engineering product development is responsible for the end product’s functionality, packaging, and maintenance. It is essentially the vehicle by which the company delivers value to the customer. Engineering teams usually follow a structured process, ensuring each release undergoes rigorous design and testing before the product reaches the market.

1. Product design and prototyping
2. Product creation
3. Testing and quality assurance
4. Support and maintenance

1. Product design and prototyping

Product engineers clock in after collecting and analyzing market research, customer demands, and overarching business goals. Their first task is determining what is feasible regarding functionality, support, budget, and time constraints. Once they’ve established a concrete roadmap, engineers dive into the creative process of conceptualizing and prototyping various ways to meet the outlined requirements.

2. Product creation

Once the product design is finalized, engineers begin building the product, which can involve software, hardware, raw materials, or a combination thereof. This is often a cross-functional effort among software developers, mechanical engineers, industrial designers, quality assurance teams, and other departments. This is an iterative process, meaning elements are built, tested, and refined until the requirements have been satisfied.

3. Testing and quality assurance

Products undergo extensive testing before being released. Quality assurance (QA) processes are designed to uncover errors, safety or security gaps, clunky user experience (UX) design, and other issues to ensure the final product is optimized.

Types of product development tests include:

• Functional testing explores the product’s capabilities to ensure it does precisely what it was designed to do
• Usability testing identifies UX issues to help refine the product for ease and satisfaction on the front end
• Performance testing evaluates the product’s ability to perform under various conditions, allowing engineers to troubleshoot issues that arise
• Safety and/or security testing assesses the product’s ability to safeguard both the customer and the business in compliance with industry and regulatory standards

When testing is complete, the product is ready to launch.

4. Support and maintenance

After releasing the product to market, the product development engineering team remains on standby to ensure the product continues to function properly. This may include offering technical assistance, resolving defects, or adding functionality based on customer feedback.

Common challenges in engineering product development

Product development is a complex, cross-functional, time-consuming, and expensive endeavor with incredibly high stakes. Teams from across the organization, including product management, operations, marketing, sales, and customer service, must collaborate.

Common challenges include:

• Siloed teams often use different tools and software, store their data in different places, have their own processes, and focus on distinct priorities. Without a more cohesive approach, this can cause communication gaps, decisions being made without all necessary information, delays, and rework.
• Shifting requirements is one of the most frustrating challenges product engineers face. With so many stakeholders working together to hit the moving targets of market demand, misaligned expectations can result in setbacks.
• Resource constraints are a reality for most companies. Product engineers are constantly balancing workload, headcount, technical limitations, and ever-shortening timelines. If this isn’t managed strategically, overworked team members are more likely to make costly errors and experience burnout.
• Tight schedules are common in product development because stakeholders desire a faster time-to-market. Because there are so many dependencies within the development process, establishing and adhering to a strict schedule is often the only way to guarantee that the right resources are available at the right times to avoid delays.

Using technology to streamline engineering product development

With quickly shifting markets, complex supply chains, fragmented data, and stringent regulatory environments, businesses across industries are turning to technology to streamline product development engineering. Product lifecycle management (PLM) software combines all the disparate pieces into one cohesive engine. It allows companies to integrate processes across the organization, optimize resources, and connect global teams.

A vital piece of PLM software is the digital thread, which offers the ability to unify product data across the entire product development lifecycle into one centralized, easily accessible repository. According to Accenture, companies implementing this type of unified tech infrastructure shorten their time-to-market by 15-40% and predict service or spare part needs with 30-45% more accuracy.

Real-world examples

Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems (TKMS) is a leader in marine technologies, serving government and civilian customers in 60 countries. TKMS needed to streamline internal processes to meet growing market demand and more effectively mine the organization’s data resources. Using a digital thread, the company mapped over 6,000 processes to establish a more agile and precise approach to product development.

ROKI, a Japanese automotive parts manufacturer, struggled with siloed development teams using disparate computer-aided design (CAD) systems. The company outsourced much of its CAD administrative work due to internal constraints around information sharing, consistently tracking versions, poor searchability, and more. By implementing a low-code PLM platform, ROKI was able to centralize its data and streamline development across systems for faster and more accurate execution. Additionally, it was able to take 50-60% of that administrative work back in-house.

How Aras can help

Aras Innovator® is a customizable, low-code PLM platform that helps product development teams achieve seamless collaboration, processes, and data management worldwide. Using this digital thread as the foundation, companies can collect and contextualize all product data for more efficient engineering product development.

Learn more about how Aras empowers engineering teams to innovate and execute products that customers love.

FAQs

How can companies reduce engineering rework caused by late design changes?
Reducing rework starts with improving cross-team visibility and aligning stakeholders earlier in the process. Centralizing product data and connecting teams via digital thread helps ensure decisions are made with full context, minimizing costly redesigns.

How do engineering teams manage requirements changes without delaying time to market?
Teams manage shifting requirements by adopting iterative development practices and continuously incorporating feedback during design and testing. Clear communication and structured processes help teams adjust quickly and keep development timelines on track.

What should engineering leaders look for in PLM software to support complex product development?
Leaders should prioritize PLM platforms that unify data, connect global teams, and support end-to-end visibility across the product lifecycle. Flexibility, collaboration tools, and the ability to manage complex processes keep development efficient and aligned.