El. knyga: Product Development: An Engineer's Guide to Business Considerations, Real-World Product Testing, and Launch

"My formal academic training began as a student of mechanical engineering. Simultaneously, I worked part time as a designer to pay for my education. In this case, my work allowed me to see how products were developed to the lower level where I was doing the technical drawing. And my engineering education helped me learn the limits of materials, think about product technical features, and how to apply mathematical formulas to solve technical problems. However, nowhere did I learn about how products are really developed. What drives a company to success? How do companies know which products will be accepted in the marketplace? What is a marketplace or a market segment? As a result, my education and early work experience taught me a lot about applying engineering principals, but I had no knowledge of marketing, sales, business finance, C-level executive support, or how R&D (research and development) and the other areas are supposed to all work together. I simply (and naively) believed that new products weredeveloped and launched by the engineering department. The product that had the better design would always be preferred by consumers. Since those days in college, and my early career in engineering, I have come a long way to understanding that product development is a multi-faceted effort involving many diverse groups and talents. It is so much more than R&D or engineering."--

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

An insightful development roadmap to help engineers and businesspeople successfully bring a product to market

In Product Development: An Engineer’s Guide to Business Considerations, Real-World Product Testing, and Launch, accomplished project manager, engineer, and business strategist David V. Tennant delivers a comprehensive walkthrough of the full scope of product development activities, from initial business considerations to real-world product testing and launch. The book covers key product development considerations like determining the target market, working with a product development team, management challenges, funding, user identification, ergonomics, product design, testing, and launch.

The distinguished author presents the material in the form of practical, hands-on tutorials with case studies featuring large corporations and small- and mid-size firms. He also includes team exercises and question-and-answer features to help early-career and aspiring engineers acquire the interdisciplinary and inter-department coordination skills they’ll require to successfully bring a new product to market.

Readers will learn about the critical roles played by the engineering, marketing, and finance departments, as well as each stage of the product development process. The book also includes:

• Thorough introductions to product development and the role of the marketing group in product development, including corporate strategy, product and business plans, and marketing leadership
• Comprehensive explorations of the role of the engineering group in product development, including functional areas led by engineers and engineering leadership
• Practical discussions of the core team and teamwork in product development, including executives’ roles, the role of the accounting department, and the identification of key stakeholders
• In-depth examinations of how to move forward with product development after project approval

Perfect for early- and mid-career engineers working in product-oriented companies, as well as marketers and other business professionals seeking to understand engineering best practices, Product Development is the ideal reference for use in upper-level undergraduate Product Development courses.