MCADCafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – PTC

By Jon Hirschtick, Chief Evangelist, PTC

Rapid Changes in Product Development in 2023: The Three A’s

Jon Hirschtick

Rapid change is knocking at the door.

Driven by massive amounts of volatility in almost every aspect of the world, product developers are in for continuing changes in the “three A’s”: Agile, Additive, and Augmented.

The first, and perhaps the most profound, change: Hardware developers are implementing Agile processes.

Why now? There are three reasons: Huge change in the world around them; lessons have been learned from agile software development; and the new generation workforce, who is “agile-native” in their culture and tools.

Just think about the world around product development companies. Faster-than-ever changes are happening in:

• Which products are made;
• The volumes of products made;
• The people on their teams;
• Where these people work;
• Supply chain partners and locations;
• Prices and availability of materials, energy, and components;
• Prices and availability of their own products;
• War, politics, and pandemics; and
• Environmental and social compliance.

Secondly, all hardware companies already develop software and use agile processes for that software development – so they can see how well it works.

The third factor in agile adoption is the new-generation workforce. They arrive in the business world with a built-in culture of agile processes in how they think and the tools they use.

We hear our customers, the product developers of the world, say things like, “We want to build hardware the way we build software,” and “We want to work like a startup – even though we are not one.”

An agile process consists of many short, time-boxed sprints – instead of one big schedule – that produces “usable product” versions (albeit incomplete). Each sprint ends with reflection and adjustments to the plan. Working products and iterative collaboration are favored over formal long-term detailed plans. There are, of course, obstacles to agile in hardware, but agile is not an all-or-nothing process and can and is being adapted successfully by growing numbers of hardware companies.

The second “A” change for this year is Additive. Sure additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, has been around for a long time, and most product developers know about it and use it.

But the thing to realize about Additive is that if you haven’t seen it lately you haven’t seen it. It’s a field where each year brings massive changes in the capabilities of machines, materials, software tools to design for additive, and the experiences, skills, innovations in the art of what’s possible.

So every product developer needs to refresh their knowledge of Additive because 2023 will be yet another giant step along the journey.

My third “A” change for 2023 is Augmented and augmenting the design engineer with computing tools that can turbocharge their work. One eponymous example is augmented reality.

In 2023, live CAD modeling can be displayed in the real world via augmented reality built into product developers’ phones and tablets.

Cloud-native tools are increasingly providing massive computer power to augment the engineer for simulation, generative design, rendering, and more.  Stay tuned for cloud-powered improvements in CAM in 2023, as well.

This makes powerful computing much more easily and readily available to every engineer, everywhere. They won’t need to deal with tedious hardware acquisition, setup, maintenance, upgrades, service packs, versions, license codes, etc. They’ll have more power and it will be right there on their computer, tablet, or even a smartphone with no hassles, and in more quantity.

These cloud-native design tools will augment their own talents to help them be the best product developer they can be – and the tools can be shared with anyone and everyone else they work with.

So for 2023, of course, I’m excited about my “3 As” of change for product developers: Agile process, Additive advances, and Augmented computing tools. But I’m even more excited by the great products that will be developed due to these 3 As!

(Portions of this article appeared on Onshape.com.)

About the Author

A technology pioneer and leading entrepreneur in the computer-aided design (CAD) software industry, Jon Hirschtick has spent his career building software products that companies use to design the cars, phones, furniture, and other products that we use every day.

Founder and longtime CEO of several successful companies, including Onshape and SolidWorks, Hirschtick is now Chief Evangelist for PTC, where he is ushering the next major advancement in product design: the adoption of cloud-native CAD and PDM to design and build products in a faster, more innovative, and more fun way.

When he is not building businesses, Hirschtick entertains customers and peers with stories from his days in the famed MIT Blackjack team, featured in the movie “21” and the History Channel’s “Breaking Vegas”. Hirschtick holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from MIT, where he majored in mechanical engineering.

Category: Industry Predictions

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 19th, 2023 at 5:11 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.