With an increasingly dynamic and innovative market, worrying about product engineering is necessary to maintain a competitive strategy and develop the company. For that, managers need to deal with challenges and manage cross functional team, that’s why project management is so important.

With increasingly demanding consumers, effectiveness, efficiency and productivity are the watchwords within a production process. Therefore, in order not to exceed costs or miss deadlines, each stage of development must rely on metrics and data to support decisions.

Thus, all product engineering must be managed, integrated and coordinated, ensuring that all phases are completed successfully. If you want to understand more about product engineering, continue reading this text.

Importance of project management in product engineering

Product engineering is the area responsible for developing and maintaining a product in operation. They are responsible for this sector that analyzes the needs of the company, as well as that of its public and seek solutions that fit within the team’s budget and meet the main characteristics sought by customers.

Project management permeates all sectors of a company. Through it, knowledge is applied and the tools and skills are put into practice so that the objectives are achieved. In short, this management enables strategies to become results.

In this sense, it is only possible to develop new products with excellence if all areas are integrated, guaranteeing the synergy of the processes. Therefore, using project management in product engineering is essential.

In addition, management makes it possible for all stages to be followed and for feedbacks to be recurrent, avoiding the continuity of errors and failures. See the main stages proposed by Cooper in the stage-gate methodology for product engineering:

• Preliminary investigation: rapid analysis and definition of the initial scope of the project;
• Detailed investigation: thorough research, resulting in the definition and justification of the project with a business plan;
• Development: creation of the design and production of the new product;
• Testing and validation: tests that validate the product and verify its effectiveness for the customer;
• Production and launch: large-scale assembly and commercial launch of the product with a focus on marketing and sales.

Therefore, each stage of development requires detailed planning and teams applied to that process. Thus, the manager must have this control to manage the activities and propose changes.

Common project management mistakes when creating products

Developing new products is a challenge and carries several risks. If the product is not well developed or the demand is not real, there are great chances that the company will create products that will never be launched or that fail in sales, due to the lack of more accurate research.

The first very common mistake is to believe that the more the team works, the better the results will be. It is true that employees need to be engaged in the processes, but the increase in productivity is not always associated with the greater number of hours of service.

When creating products, any cost reduction makes a difference. Therefore, many managers choose to buy many inputs and produce large batches to save on a large scale, but the real savings occur in small batches, as it is possible to check for faults and make adjustments more quickly.