Design inputs from marketing - any existing strategies?
Design inputs from marketing - any existing strategies?
(OP)
My company specializes in contract manufacturing of medical devices, but have done many development projects for our customers. We have a new drive to develop our own proprietary products based on inputs from our marketing/sales team. There has been a lot of turbulence in this because the expectations of marketing are not in sync with the engineering development steps (discovery, planning, testing, design iterations, etc).
Clearly some procedures need to be in place to get everyone on the same page. I was wondering if there are any industry standards out there that I could start with or read up on to help form our own program.
Clearly some procedures need to be in place to get everyone on the same page. I was wondering if there are any industry standards out there that I could start with or read up on to help form our own program.





RE: Design inputs from marketing - any existing strategies?
The medical marketing people with whom I tangled for several decades could all provide a good synopsis of what is being offered in the marketplace, right now. ... which is pretty much what they presented as market needs for the future.
That outfit's gestation time for a new product ranged from three to twelve years, with a median around five years.
I could never get <pejorative> Marketing </pejorative> types to understand that we needed a window into the market, five or more years into the future, in order to have a chance of meeting the market with a competitive product. All I got in response was blank stares, or worse.
Fortunately for that outfit, The Founder maintained such a personal window into the future, and also used a scattergun approach where he had maybe a hundred pirate projects going on, under everyone's radar, asking and answering forward looking questions like, "Could we build a machine to make a Magntic Resonance Image of a single cell?". I was privileged to be one of his pirates.
Unfortunately for that outfit, The Founder died. ... which is why I don't work there anymore.
Its remains were just sold, again.
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
RE: Design inputs from marketing - any existing strategies?
RE: Design inputs from marketing - any existing strategies?
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
RE: Design inputs from marketing - any existing strategies?
RE: Design inputs from marketing - any existing strategies?
But seriously, much of the Six Sigma & NPI stuff freely available on the web includes discussions & methods for capturing customer / marketing / sales input in a formal way. The challenge is that it is (in my experience) a grindingly slow, tedious, many-meetings-required, poorly-facilitated process and it usually gets ignored or under-resourced to its ultimate failure as a useful process. Nothing less than an Edict-From-On-High would force that group to undergo this process.
TygerDawg
Blue Technik LLC
Virtuoso Robotics Engineering
www.bluetechnik.com
RE: Design inputs from marketing - any existing strategies?
Fortunately we are not tied to them and can proceed in our own way - WHICH works well.
My biggest bitch is that one we meet ALL their expectations - they DON'T use it!!
RE: Design inputs from marketing - any existing strategies?
I think some of our managers got training from Cadence Management Corporation - though I'm not saying that's an endorsement from me.
As the end of the day tygerdawgs second paragraph pretty much sums up my experience.
You may find some stuff in forum768: -Engineering Project Management for instance thread768-272985: new product development tracking metrics.
What is Engineering anyway: FAQ1088-1484: In layman terms, what is "engineering"?
RE: Design inputs from marketing - any existing strategies?
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
RE: Design inputs from marketing - any existing strategies?
http://pdma.org
They used to advocate the engineering and project management end of things, and had some program literature that helped get the non-technical development drivers (marketing, sales, finance, upper management) to understand the process.
I say "used to" because I haven't been in that game for quite a while.
Sometimes, the hardest part has been getting buy-in on the impossible-to-know parts of the Gantt chart. UL turnaround time? And oh my goodness, does your medical device have to go to FDA? What might be the lead time on the specialized processor that you haven't chosen yet? Those can be tough.
Best of luck and a barrel of serenity to you.
Good on ya,
Goober Dave
Haven't see the forum policies? Do so now: Forum Policies
RE: Design inputs from marketing - any existing strategies?
Why bother with the bureaucracy and cost?
Might there not be planning and execution techniques that could actually help?
Unfortunately, if everyone sits around, looks at themselves, and says, "We use stage-gate!" without questioning the value of it, they'll never get around to the second question.
Although a bit dated, one of my favorite books on the subject is Developing Products in Half the Time. It's available on Kindle.
Agile project management is a technique from software development that I've been experimenting with physical in product development.
Another software technique that I like to apply in product development - at least to establish a mindset and guide the continued development of a product or platform - is refactoring. In software, there is even less of an opportunity for clean sheet design than in physical goods (see Borland, Netscape). Refactoring is making improvements to parts of the code as you go, which is aided by well defined interfaces, knowing how you would do "it" (there are many "it"s) if you could start from scratch, and knowing where you eventually want to be. I apologize for the vagueness. It's a subject that deserves more attention than this.
That said, sometimes you just have to make a clean break from evolutionary design. Evolution can produce a cheetah, but sometimes you get a platypus (TM Rob Campbell :)
One more general product development insight, regarding adapting/copying one of your own products or a competitor's to enter a new market or market segment:
It is difficult to profitably scale a high-end product/technology down to capture a piece of the low end market. This can be scaling down in a literal or figurative sense (e.g., format size or accuracy). Simply "smallening" the parts doesn't reduce the cost enough to maintain margins. And some customers who would have bought the high-end version if it was the only option will buy the low end (cannibalization). Typically, a more significant design departure is required to make it work.
Conversely, modifying a low end product to move up market and increase profits is often quite easy.
Rob Campbell
Imagitec: Imagination - Expertise - Execution
RE: Design inputs from marketing - any existing strategies?
Systems engineering is the general formal field that encapsulates this, and SS and the like have nicked some of the tools and repackaged them.
In the end there is no real objective way of doing this, it really comes down to vision and experience of the participants. But at least the objective framework provides one way of structuring the process.
Having said that the first thing you find out is that customers are liars. Therefore marketing's input is often less useful than you'd hope. eg, if you ask people whether they'll pay extra for reduced fuel consumption, and how much, you can build a nice little model showing what you need to give in mpg per dollar. If you base your product plans on that you will be very sad.
Cheers
Greg Locock
New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?
RE: Design inputs from marketing - any existing strategies?
RE: Design inputs from marketing - any existing strategies?
RE: Design inputs from marketing - any existing strategies?
Also, thanks to everyone providing useful input on this post. I have looked into your suggestions and have begun developing with my team a process to improve our internal communication and ultimately product development outcomes.
RE: Design inputs from marketing - any existing strategies?
I big part of it is defining the requirements. We do it in a 2 stage process.
1. Marketing do their thing and come up with a Marketing Requirements Document. Here they summarize what they believe the market needs based on there analysis. We work with them to try and put in hard requirements or clarify points etc. but at the end of the day it's Marketing's wish list.
2. Once they're done we then take their input and turn it into the Product Requirement Document. In an ideal world there's not much change - except for adding a formal approval block! In practice we normally need to flush out hard requirements and pass fail criteria etc. working with Marketing. Often we'll have to try and summarize a great long PowerPoint into a simple table form or similar with specific requirements. We also take manufacturing & services initial input at this stage.
Once this PRD is done it gets presented at one of the stage gate meetings and then goes through formal approval loop from the great & the good.
Once approved, then the requirements are more or less frozen. We're not great at this, we often get a bit of scope creep without properly revisiting the PRD & associated approvals. Though in fairness this is sometimes because when we wrote the PRD we didn't know what we didn't know etc.
There has to be some ability to change the PRD based on significant new information but as Tick & dshandling say the cost and schedule impacts of changes need to be taken into account.
What is Engineering anyway: FAQ1088-1484: In layman terms, what is "engineering"?
RE: Design inputs from marketing - any existing strategies?
The idea is not that we have a perfect crystal ball, it just means there is some logic in the direction at any point in the program. So it may be necessary to make late changes to the spec, whether from legislation, or a competitor raises the stakes, or the environment changes.
Cheers
Greg Locock
New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?
RE: Design inputs from marketing - any existing strategies?
For instance, in the later stages when I say marketing it also includes sales and applications folks. Likewise manufacturing includes purchasing/supply chain management, manufacturing engineering & operations.
What is Engineering anyway: FAQ1088-1484: In layman terms, what is "engineering"?