Success factors in product development projects: expert opinions

Abstract

Successful product development is a common challenge for technical and management experts. The increasing pressure on time reduction and cost savings while enhancing product features, requires rethinking project management methods. This paper analyses the opinions of product development experts about the success factors of product development projects. A voluntary online survey was used for data collection in 2020. The study confirms that development engineers, test engineers, project managers, and product development managers have partially different approaches to important success factors. Precise regulation and focus on collaboration are considered essential topics. The results show that knowledge management and collaboration with other organizational units must be improved. Enhancing the interpretation of project success and forcing the better utilization of lessons learned or module information can contribute to sustainable success.

Evaluation of Product Development Success: A Student Perspective

“…'Soft' factors of projects such as communication and collaboration are appreciated. A former study among product development experts (Soltész and Berényi 2021) found the importance of teamwork, project manager's control, and other factors of success that allow flexibility and responses to the uncertainty of the project. However, a well-defined project goal is among the most important success factors next to these.…”

“…This confirms the need for managing uncertainty (Szabó and Cserháti 2013). However, literature on product development success (González and Palacios 2002;Cooper 2019) reflect the even more agile approach and highlights the strategic focus, communication, team skills, knowledge management, and other soft factors, and a survey among product development experts (Soltész and Berényi 2021) confirmed that beyond that adherence to stability, setting clear project goals is given a high weight. A clearly written set of project goals, as a specification or scope, was evaluated as the most important success factor, followed by the collaboration of the project team.…”