Difference between product design and product development?

Answer 1

In today's business environment the term Product Design and Product Development are interchangeable; they mean the same thing. Recently corporations have blurred the lines of when Design stops and Development begins as more companies adopt new and current processes. Some might say that Design is the front end or the conceptual phase where as Development is the back end, the engineering and manufacturing efforts. That school of thought has become outdated and is simply not true anymore. There is a big push going on which link divisions like Industrial Design, Engineering, Manufacturing, Sales, and Marketing into the development process from the first stage gate to work the problem through to product launch. All key stakeholder have a buy in, all have an influence. The difference in Design phases and Development phases has been eradicated and groups don't throw projects "over the wall" to each other anymore. Today, smart companies are using the groups "Design" effort as the Development process.

Part of this Design process is to uncover the features the product should have in order for the product to be successful in the market. If you are experiencing a product that you feel has too many features or is not easy to use, then perhaps you were not the target user and mislead into thinking the product was something you would find useful. On the other hand, perhaps the company gave up trying to figure out what features users really wanted and made the product do everything. In this case then yes, the company took a shortcut. Companies often let the obscurity of what users want in a product just that, an obscurity. Instead of spend the time and money figuring the problem out they deal with the problem by producing something that does everything and nothing well. Companies like this confuse themselves and their customers. They demonstrate their inability to think differently and plan ahead, really becoming inefficient in the end. What product in particular are you having a poor experience with?