Key Success Factors of Software-Intensive Product Development

This paper revisits the key success factors of new product development by investigating a software-intensive product development project, which is presented in form of a detailed qualitative case study. The result reconfirms the existing wisdom that factors like top management sponsorship, presence of a heavy-weight project manager, close cross-functional collaboration and communication, skill routines and supporting tools used during the project execution as well as unambiguous and systematic product concept are essential enablers for the product development project to become a success. The case study has also revealed a number of additional aspects such as management competences in geographical coordination, complementary incentive system and contract management which, if managed insufficiently, may lead to unsatisfactory performance of the product development. Innovation managers in software industry may therefore pay attention to them, in order to improve the product development quality.