Organizing for Innovation: Leveraging the Creative Tension between Product Management and Systems Engineering

Product management and systems engineering — never (or, mostly never) the twain shall meet. The disconnect between product vision and technical vision impedes vast untapped productivity and creativity. We will explore and propose new models of collaboration and social innovation for integrating the product vision and the technical vision into a shared vision.

Systems engineering is not electrical engineering or mechanical engineering or chemical engineering. Systems engineering is not software engineering. As we will explain, systems engineering is “the queen of the disciplines”. In that nature lies its unique potential to dialogue with product management and accelerate product development. We will augment our rather unconventional application of systems engineering with design thinking and behavioral science to create a sandbox that frames the problem and possible solutions.

We have recently observed and experienced this dilemma from both the product management perspective and the systems engineering perspective; we have detected the various lamentations of the corresponding professional communities. We will use this MVP (“Minimum Viable Presentation”) in an interactive format to explore possible routes for bridging this inter-disciplinary gap. We will model lean innovation / experimental design by engaging our audience as co-creators in advancing the concept.

• Design
• Development
• Other
• Hardware
• Startups