‘It’s all about the process,” says MIT professor Warren Seering. He’s referring to his product design and development class (identified as Course 2.739), but he could easily be talking about product development itself. 

“We want 2.739 students to leave with a set of methods readily available to them to use at whatever stage they are at in the development process,” says Seering, a professor of mechanical engineering. “This is their introduction to a much more structured approach to developing new products.”

Seering’s students experience that structure first-hand as part of a six- to eight-member team that designs and develops a new product throughout the semester. Each team consists of at least one engineering student, one MIT Sloan School of Management student, and one student from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), which partners with MIT for the course.

The benefit of bringing together students from different backgrounds—engineering, business, and industrial design—represents the students’ first real-world lesson, Seering says: learning how to value and collaborate with contributors from various disciplines as they develop a successful product together.

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