Experience report on the effect of market reposition on product line evolution

This paper presents the result of a study on the changes that occurred in the product line of a supplier of telecommunications equipments as a result of the top management decision to change the product line´s target market. The study examines six years of data and identifies potential relationships between changes in the product line and changes in the company´s customer, inner context, and product layers. Some of the key findings include - that sales are negatively related to product line growth and positively related to design turnover and the number of designers assigned to the product line. In addition, the results show that there is no relationship between the size of the code added to the product line and the number of designers required to develop and test it. Furthermore, product repositioning includes moving assets from individual products to the product line.