Designing Product Families: From Strategy to Implementation

Overview

In today’s highly competitive and volatile market, rapid innovation and mass customization offer a new form of competitive advantage—pushing organizations to implement strategies for designing and developing an entire family of products. In our eight-week Designing Product Families: From Strategy to Implementation program, you’ll explore how product architecture, platforms, and commonality can help you deploy and manage a family of products.

Participant Takeaways

• Understand the evolution of the industry from craft manufacturing to mass customization.
• Grasp fundamental concepts in product architecting such as architectural decisions, decomposition and function-form mapping during conceptual design.
• Understand the platform concept and be able to prioritize drivers of modularity and product platform design.
• Enumerate metrics for quantifying commonality within a product family.
• Identify major contemporary methods and tools for product family and platform design.
• Understand how benchmarking can assist platform and product family design.
• Understand organizational issues such as divergence in platforms and management roles in platforms.
• Leverage platforms for identifying new market and product opportunities to generate revenue growth.

For more information, please visit the MIT Professional Education course listing here.