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Design Thinking & Strategic Product Planning For Highly Engineered Products, Shannon Dare Wayne

Wayne State University Dissertations

This paper offers an integrated framework to systematically address routine challenges plaguing early product development for highly engineered and complex products, such as automobiles. The framework includes up-front strategic product planning leveraging ‘design thinking’ and ‘design execution’ through a structured process to enable adaptation under uncertainties in the product development lifecycle for customer delight and program success. Included is product planning, from fuzzy front-end until product launch, and prioritizing aligned strategic initiatives while integrating design thinking throughout the process. We also discuss two real-world case studies to emphasize the efficacy of the framework and to demonstrate practical examples of how …