Identifying Key Requirements for a New Product Line

Product lines should be based on the business reality in the selected market segments. Since the success of the product line is determined by the success of the resulting products, it is essential to guarantee that the key requirements of each identified market segment are satisfied. A critical issue for any company pursuing product line development is the competitiveness of their products against products from other manufacturers. The competitiveness can be realized by carefully managing the differentiating requirements during the initial analysis of the product line requirements. For industrial scale product lines, the number of initial requirements can be large, seriously hindering the analysis. In this paper, we first discuss the economic foundation of differentiating requirements. Then we show how to identify the key requirements for a product line and in which way we can reduce the set of requirements that needs to be discussed during the analysis. Finally, we demonstrate our approach with a worked example where we analyze the key requirements in terms of differentiation among the products.