Executive Education

Description
Product Design, Development, and Management presents product development as an information processing system that can transform customer needs into successful product designs and manufacturing plans. Participants focus on decisions that product development teams must make about markets, concepts, and products, and how to make those decisions in a fast-paced development environment.

During an intense week of lectures and hands-on practice sessions, they learn world-class best practices for:

• structuring product families, architectures, and portfolios
• understanding customer needs, and translating those needs into winning product concepts that have realistic technical specifications
• mapping and implementing the product development process
• designing products that function properly, even under a wide range of operating conditions
• implementing concurrent engineering;
• organizing teams and the product development process;
• managing uncertainty during the product development process;
• facilitating communication and collaboration within product development teams; and
• accessing and integrating an organization's internal capabilities.

The Participants
Product Design, Development, and Management is for managers experienced with developing new products as well as for those new to the process. Past participants have included program and product managers in manufacturing and other technology-intensive industries, and marketing and manufacturing managers involved in product development.

“Great course, great content, and excellent presentations. I plan to send two or three members of my team to the next session.”
Thomas Geehan, PhD
Director of Technology, Drilling Waste Management
M-I Swaco, U.S.

“Send your entire team, if possible, before a major development project. It's a fantastic course that provides very useful tools.”
Jill Carr
Program Manager
Analog Devices, U.S.

“Best program I've taken in 15 years. It provides an integrated approach to designing products, from product idea/concept development and design to product development and launch, and gives you all the tools you need to succeed. ”
John K. Wamugi
President & CEO
Finmetrics Technologies, U.S.

Faculty
Faculty Leader: Steven D. Eppinger, General Motors Leaders for Global Operations Chair and Professor of Management Science at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has a joint appointment in MIT's Engineering Systems Division. His research creates new approaches to improve complex product development processes. This work has been applied primarily in the automotive, electronics, aerospace, and equipment industries. Co-author of Product Design and Development, the primary text for this course, Eppinger lectures regularly for international corporations and in executive education programs and has consulted for or conducted research with more than fifty organizations. He has worked as a manufacturing engineer, product designer, and consultant in both prototype and production operations.
 
Janice Klein studies the introduction of new ideas into the workplace. She focuses on integrating the social and technical aspects of organizational change, through research, teaching, and consulting that are grounded in such resources and initiatives as lean production systems, job design, and the changing role of lower levels of management in response to the introduction of new technology and employee empowerment. Klein is currently studying the impact of organizational culture on knowledge transfer and the development and maintenance of high performance, globally dispersed teams. General Expertise: Human resource management, operations management, organizational change.
Matthew Kressy, Senior Lecturer, is a practicing product designer with over 20 years of professional experience in all aspects of product development, with particular emphasis on customer-oriented research, industrial design, prototype development, and manufacturing sourcing. With faculty appointments at MIT and the Rhode Island School of Design, he lectures on interdisciplinary design methods and integrated product development.

Mark Mortensen, Assistant Professor of Organization Studies, studies group dynamics in geographically distributed teams and the effects of technology on interpersonal interaction. Mortensen's recent research includes studies of distributed team structure as well as a series of studies examining the different nature of conflict within geographically co-located and distributed work teams.

Eric von Hippel is Professor, Management of Innovation, at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research examines the sources of and economics of innovation, with a particular focus on the significant role played by users in the innovation development process. Leading-edge companies are using his proven practical methods worldwide to develop major breakthroughs systematically.