Improve product portfolio management and decisions – Increase number of product ideas conceptualized, evaluated and designed. Manage product portfolio to keep competitors from entering your markets. Continuing to invest in successful “platform/derivative”.

Increase product modularity design – Design products to be a collection of connected modules. This facilitates cost-effective customization because variations can be created by swapping different modules for one another without changing the surrounding product architecture.

Improve translation of Customer needs into product features – After understanding customer needs, ensure direct translation into product features. Link needs data closely with product specification data to enable an audit trail over time and to ensure that no customer need data is lost.

Improve collaboration with customers – Actively seek feedback from customers over the lifecycle of a product to generate and act upon ideas for product improvement.

Enable customer ability to configure products (design-to-order) – Empower the customer to self-innovate by configuring products to their specific requirements within the boundaries of possible product configurations (i.e., prevent incompatible configurations).

Improve collaboration with design partners – Better collaboration with design partners entails shared data sources, formalized channels of communication and feedback, access to intellectual property, etc. By making collaboration easier, it will happen faster which will directly lower time to production and ultimately time to volume.

Improve quality of components and suppliers – Use quality reviews and ranking of suppliers and components to drive sourcing and design-in of higher quality components.

Implement design for product linkages/ dependencies – Design products to be complementary and dependent on one another to increase the customer’s investment in your overall product line. As customers buy more of your products over time they begin to feel beholden as they realize the synergies between products and the cost savings that result from being able to use multiple products in an increasing number of new combinations.

Reduce time between product iterations – Release new products on a shorter time cycle to ensure that they offer the latest functionality while minimizing the risk of introducing new/untested features and components.

Increase design reuse – Catalog all prior product designs for easy search and reuse / adaptation to current and future product development efforts. Effective design reuse shortens process steps resulting in faster time-to-market, higher quality and lower cost.

Increase product modularity for manufacturing and supply chain – By building products off a common “platform” with modular components, a company can increase the number of common parts as well as the volume passing through core manufacturing processes. This maximizes factory utilization and lowers marginal cost. It also allows for simplified orders with suppliers (which will improve supplier performance) increases order volumes with individual suppliers which will drive lower component costs and better supplier relations.

Improve internal collaboration / concurrent engineering – Increase the sharing of work-in-process designs and information across groups within an enterprise to facilitate parallel work activities.

Integrate thought leadership in product design (lead users, topic leaders) – Create processes and capabilities to identify, collect, digest, and use the latest thinking and developments in your particular product space. This often includes focus groups with “Lead Users,” approaching academic institutions, etc.

Optimize design for proprietary services/interfaces – Design products to readily interface with your other products and services. These interfaces will make it easier and more likely that customers will buy from you (instead of competitors) when they consider add-on products and services.

Increase leverage of existing Intellectual Property (patents/copyrights) in product design – Audit current patent portfolio to identify additional uses and then cluster groups of proprietary, previously-patented designs into current products to bolster legal defensibility.