Challenges in Product Management for High Tech Sensors

This talk highlights the challenges that product managers face in the field of semiconductor based MEMS sensors for innovative, fast-moving markets. The foundation is built by a number of lessons learned based on experience in the mobile and IoT markets.

The mobile and IoT ecosystems are complex and defined by a variety of different players (e.g. device manufacturers, network providers, hardware and software solutions vendors, app developers). For a sensor solutions provider like Sensirion to introduce a new product successfully and sustainably into the market, it is crucial to understand this ecosystem and its players. OEMs typically understand the general direction they want to advance their products to, but for a specific new feature to be integrated they require a complete value proposition (HW, SW, Use Cases) for a lack of time, specific know-how and experience to develop the feature themselves. They act as system integrators and have extremely short development cycles of 6 months as opposed to the development cycles of sensors which is at 2-3 years. This turns product planning and development into a complex optimization problem that requires constant adjustments and iterations.

In order to master these challenges, Sensirion has adopted a lean-inspired, but still hardware-compatible innovation and product development process.