For many companies, switching between these two very different ways of working – product maintenance and product development – generates lots of short term inefficiencies, as well as stress and frustration for employees. 

The solution? Agile product development can help you find the right way of working during both product maintenance and new product development phases, and help you keep essential skills up to date within the team.

Challenges for MedTech companies

What makes medical technology different from throwaway consumer products? Developing a new product with innovative features or technology can take years. These projects require substantial investment, with the result that the products tend to remain on the market for a long time. 

Lots of medical technology companies are SMEs – in Germany, for example, it’s over 90%. For these companies, financing and realising major development projects is a big challenge. As a result, many focus on developing just a single product line, while using lifecycle management to keep other products on the market. Once it’s been developed, it’s not uncommon for a product line to remain on the market for 15 years or more. Over this period, development teams will be optimising and enhancing it, adding selected new features, and managing discontinued components.

One consequence of this, and this is something I come across often, is that teams get stuck in a product maintenance mindset and forget how to develop new products from scratch. That’s because product maintenance and new product development are in many ways fundamentally different.

Product maintenance – stability and specialisation

When you’re maintaining a product for many years, the objective is to optimise your existing products and to just keep them running. That means minor corrections, updates, and functional enhancements, such as incorporating new technologies, adapting to changing regulatory requirements, and replacing discontinued components. The R&D team’s ways of working and skill set mould themselves to this stable, familiar technical environment. The team mostly works in short cycles of manageable complexity. 

It’s natural that day-to-day working patterns become optimised to this way of working. Over the years, employees build up an excellent understanding of the product and the technology involved. They know all the details intimately, can deal rapidly with any requests, and can make technically accurate suggestions. But this high degree of specialisation comes at a price.

New product development, on the other hand, is a totally different beast. At the risk of stating the obvious, the object here is to develop a completely new product. It might be based on existing products, but either way it’s going to include completely innovative functionality and technologies. This is a much broader undertaking, running from brainstorming, concept development, and technical design, through to licensing and product launch.

Dealing with vague requirements, technical and methodological uncertainty, and changes to the constraints imposed on the product are everyday occurrences. The team needs to coordinate more and needs to formulate medium term plans without losing sight of its long-term goals. It has to work with other departments where there are no formal procedures for doing so. Precisely the sorts of things, in other words, that agile product development is so good at.

The challenges that need to be overcome during new product development are very different from the challenges during product maintenance. Teams that have worked together on the latter for many years have to relearn this style of development – to succeed they require a completely different mindset. They need to be willing to take risks, to accept that mistakes will be made, and they need to be continuously weighing up the balance between deadlines, quality, and scope.

Agile product development

In my experience, agile product development is a highly effective solution that addresses many of the day-to-day problems arising during new product development: 

1. Consistent application of agile methodologies improves collaboration and communication within the team.
2. Agile methodologies make it easier to visualise project progress and log jams within the team.
3. They also facilitate more deliberate project management, enabling plans to be adjusted and work to be prioritised depending on business value and risk exposure.

At Zühlke, large development projects are our bread and butter. As a client manager, I see every day how easily our teams dive into unfamiliar projects over and over again. Innumerable project initiations have shown us that we know how to set up new projects successfully and have taught us to trust in our methods, processes, and knowledge. So when client-side teams or teams at other providers struggle with precisely these challenges, I can’t help but notice.

In my view, agile product development principles would be of huge help to these teams. We see the success of these methods every day. Client teams can benefit from this experience by working with our project teams in joint teams with the client’s developers, or through specific coaching measures.

Choosing to get on board with agile product development pays particular dividends for companies aiming to systematically re-enable innovation. It is, however, up to the R&D management team or even the board to find the right time to make this change and embark on this journey together.