Most product development teams today follow an Agile product development process. While this ensures agility in how products are developed, it is also important for the engineers to ponder ways on how to make the product design agile by itself.
An effective and Agile product design would let organizations respond to supply disruptions through rapid design changes. 2020 was a benchmark year in this direction, with global businesses that had embraced Agile design responding better to the supply shortages by delivering alternate designs faster than the competition.
The first step towards Design for Agility would involve focusing on design modularity, which would involving exploring whether the existing (or target) product architecture is built based on modular design principles.
Embracing these principles would let us subdivide a given system into smaller modules, which can then be independently developed, modified, replaced, or exchanged – ensuring a faster response time across the product lifecycle.