About 15 years ago, if someone had told David Schofield, an advanced surfacing designer at Trek Bicycle, that one day he and his team would owe their product design process to 17 software developers who met in a Utah resort in 2001 to discuss lightweight software development methods, he probably would raise an eyebrow. What lesson could a bicycle designer hope to learn from software development? 

As history would have it, those 17 individuals emerged from their meeting with a document now known as the Agile Manifesto, a collection of four core values and 12 principles of software development. Since its release, this document has given rise to Agile, which has become the standard method of developing software. And today, the concept is increasingly influencing the way physical products are designed and manufactured as well.

Says Jon Hirschtick, Chief Evangelist of global technology company PTC, “Our customers are the manufacturing companies of the world, and they are at a fork in the road in terms of product development. While they are using digital technologies to create, engineer, manufacture, and service their products in better ways, some are struggling to move fast enough. The pace of business—and change—is faster than ever.” 

Today, companies face customer demands for innovation and personalization, skilled labor shortages and continuing supply chain woes. 

To overcome these obstacles, many organizations are abandoning the traditional Waterfall, or sequential, approach to product development in favor of Agile. They need to innovate and develop products faster, while at the same time becoming more robust with remote and hybrid collaboration. 

What Is Agile Product Development?

Agile, in this context, is not just about quickness or flexibility. It also defines an approach to project management and execution. It prioritizes iterative development, with teams moving in weeks or months to rapidly develop and fine-tune products alongside near-constant customer feedback. 

In Waterfall methodology, by contrast, every process follows a linear path: Processes move through phases in one direction, with backtracking largely impossible or too expensive. Emphasis is placed on optimization at every stage instead of on advancement. Need to design a car? Engineers draw up a design; manufacturers build it; retailers sell it. Stage follows stage follows stage. 

Agile favors cycles over stages. Developers and stakeholders collaborate on a design, providing steady feedback. Objectives are accomplished in sprints, typically dictated directly by customer input. A customer asks for a product and the team sprints to meeting a first deliverable, which ideally is some version of the product, albeit a very limited or incomplete version. The customer then gives feedback, and the team adjusts future sprints, iterating until they create the new product. Sprints tend to be short—days to weeks—and focused on accomplishing rapid, small iterations of a working, testable product, rather than mere steps along a pre-scheduled overall plan.

Tools Change with Agile

“When software development began adopting Agile, it wasn't just a mindset change,” Hirschtick says. “The tools had to change as well to meet the needs of a new way of working.” Eventually, such tools as JIRA, GitHub, Slack, Google Docs, and many more emerged—and Agile took off. 

The same thing is happening now in product development. “Engineers and designers understand the need to iterate faster, to collaborate seamlessly, to communicate better,” he says. “And now the tools to fully execute are here.” 

Among those who have made the shift is Trek, the world-renowned bicycle company. Its product engineers, like many others, use computer-aided design (CAD) to create 3D models of its bikes. As customer demands increased, Trek felt pressure to innovate faster, reduce time-to-market, and differentiate from the competition. The engineers also needed a solution that allowed their team to work more efficiently, regardless of locations, without the risk of locked files or duplicated versions. Accomplishing these objectives meant turning to a cloud-native platform, which is why Trek started using Onshape. 

Onshape is PTC’s cloud-native CAD and product data management (PDM) SaaS solution built to help customers make products in a new and more efficient way. 

Onshape provides one source of truth, which multiple people can simultaneously access during the design process without creating duplicates. Any authorized user can see and edit the design, and these edits will show up in real time to other users. In this way, the ability to obtain feedback is streamlined and the product evolves over numerous small iterations, rather than undergoing the broad-strokes approval process of traditional Waterfall product development. 

Product developers seeking to adopt Agile find Onshape and cloud-native tools in general (such as Slack, Miro, Smartsheet, and JIRA) to be a much better fit with this approach than older installed, file-based tools. Collaboration is faster and more effective across multiple stakeholders—from engineers, to freelance designers, suppliers and partners. 

Extending Agile to Manufacturing

Companies using Agile philosophies are not stopping at design and engineering. The concept is being pulled into manufacturing and operations as well. “An Agile mindset understands that customer preferences may change,” Hirschtick says. “And when it does, it must be implemented quickly and consistently throughout the entire organization.”

Hirschtick, who co-founded both Onshape and SolidWorks, has had a decades-long impact on the CAD industry and is considered a thought leader in the field. He says that this rapid response ability, along with supply chain collaboration and investments in an employee culture that values creativity and adaptability, are all central to Agile in the production space. This shift in focus and approach again requires different tools; PTC’s Arena PLM system is the world’s most popular cloud-native product lifecycle management system in large part because it embodies these principles.

SomaLogic Inc., a specialized biomarker discovery and clinical diagnostics company in the highly regulated industry of healthcare, switched to Arena to create a single source of truth that could be accessed anywhere. This improved not only collaboration but also transparency and visibility throughout the creation process. The company is now embracing Agile and doing more, developing faster, and operating with a higher degree of vigorous oversight than before. 

The Future of Product Development 

Ultimately, product developers and manufacturers only want solutions, whether technological or philosophical, that will improve their bottom line. “To this end, there is one crucial fact to remember,” Hirschtick says. “There is no such thing as the methodology police. Many companies have adopted certain Agile policies while ignoring others, and this is acceptable.” 

Still, tools need to match the process. Companies may find it limiting to shoehorn certain Agile principles into an established Waterfall business flow. It is in an organization’s best interest to lean into the full potential of a product development philosophy while using every available advantage. 

Agile is ideally suited for winning in today’s fast-changing, more competitive world of product design and manufacturing. With most companies feeling the pressure to act more quickly to avoid missing increasingly small windows of opportunity, it is difficult to imagine Agile being left behind. 

This story was produced by PTC.