TRIZ Application for Digital Product Design and Management

Abstract

In the 20th century, the concept of Product Design was centered on an engineering process aimed at projecting and further developing a technological and as a rule physically tangible product. Thus, to support the heuristic stage of Product Design the TRIZ toolkit has appeared and turned to be an effective tool for engineers and inventors assisted at technological obstacles overcoming process. However, in the 21st century the commercial Product itself changes its forms and a way it’s being developed and leads to the market. The main reasons for that are decreased time-to-market, the dynamically changing product requirements, opportunities to effectively test product hypotheses and to use flexible development methodologies. These properties are peculiar for the products that launch in the digital era. Thus, present-day products require more and more design strategy and vision decisions rather than only engineering tricks to successfully meet market needs. With these realities, the User Experience and User Interface of the product, monetization model, the target audience, communication and branding become an integral part of the Product Design and Product Management processes. This article aims to demonstrate on several case studies how appropriately TRIZ methodology is able to support a heuristic stage of the modern Product Design and Management processes.