A successful product development process requires the close collaboration between integrated product teams. According to www.npd-solutions.com, an integrated product team (IPT) can be made up of different stakeholders which may include Users, Customers, Engineers, Product Managers, Marketing, Project Managers, etc. Naturally, as product development activities change and evolve over the course of its liefcycle, so too does the leadership within an integrated product team. As www.npd-solutions.com clearly explains:“While Marketing personnel, Product Managers, Project Managers and Design Engineers may be the most prominent members early in the life cycle, Design Engineers, Manufacturing Engineers, Quality Engineers and Procurement gain a bigger voice during detailed design.”
Integrated product teams helps organizations make the right strategic product decisions regarding direction and determining requisite changes to the plan. This includes making decisions regarding when plans should change and determining the impact potential changes might have on a particular product or service. They also serve as a “collaborative soundboad” for communicating corporate strategies and goals with all stakeholders, inside and outside the organization. Integrated product teams help to ensure everyone works together to achieve desired results.
Integrated product teams need integrated tools
In addition to a solid synergy, your integrated product teams need tools that will enable them to easily:
- Integrate all the main processes together: feedback collection, requirements management, and project management tasks.
- Link feedback to related requirements to ensure action is being taken.
- Make important product support decisions and prioritize requirements based on critical business goals.
- Assess and evaluate requirements using metrics like cost-benefit, customer satisfaction, popularity and strategic alignment.
- Collaborate with all stakeholders and keep them informed by sending them requests for revenue estimates and effort estimates.
- Gain full visibility into the product decision-making process and get the whole team working together on the product roadmap.
The key to creating great integrated product teams is to be able to unify core product development processes that can be tied together to create transparency, and open the lines of communication between all stakeholders involved. In addition, integrated product teams, at their core, must be adaptable enough to be able to meet changing dynamics and unexpected issues or problems that may arise throughout the course of product development.
We want to know: What makes an integrated product team successful?