Research & Development - Product Development

This category of engineer has the responsibility to leverage upon a set of known technologies to realize a desired functionality via the design or improvement of a new or existing product.

It is quite normal that as the marketing engineers visit customers, they will get inputs from customers about the weaknesses of their product offerings. They will also get feedback about what customers wish for in terms of new functionalities. In many cases, it is possible to realize these objectives by integrating what is already known about the technologies in question. No new knowledge needs to be developed to get this done. What is needed is innovative integration and solution creation.

In this world, there are a lot more product development engineers than R&D engineers although the definition of R&D tends to expand to encompass both job categories. Product engineers are generally not new knowledge generators, but rather to function as inventors and innovators. They are experts at adopting new and existing technologies and knowledge to deliver the solutions that market need.

Here are some key objectives for an product development engineer

• Create new market driven solutions from the current portfolio of products and technologies.
• Keep track of competition product offerings and innovate ways to out create them in terms of features, cost and performance.
• Keep abreast of new technology trends and innovations to become early technology adopters for the specific product portfolios under his responsibilities.
• Build strong alignment with NPI engineers to keep abreast with the latest manufacturing and supplier technologies and find ways to leverage on these.
• Typically a product development engineer is an expert in at least two fields of interest and an integrator across many other fields. The person can be considered to be an expert in the chosen field and a technology “super user” in other areas – A technology integration expert.

A product development engineer should be well versed in the processes that make up the design chain that starts from an idea all the way to the realization of a final product. The engineer understands and is able to build project plans involving multiple players as well as designing to cost envelops.

Here are some success characteristics for a product development engineer.

• An adopter of new and existing technologies.
• An excellent understanding of the product development process
• How teams work together to design a realistic and manufacturable product.
• Able to work with management to facilitate decision making in a timely manner. – put well-analyzed scenarios together.
• A large technical knowledge envelops to enable thinking out of the box.
• Excellent problem solver both technical, process and human relationship related.