The skills required to discover and organize useful information are good communications skills, negotiating skills and information management and synthesizing experience.

Communications requires listening as well as asking questions.  Negotiating comes in handy when the other teams feel they've given you all the information they believe they have or that you need, but you need to request valuable time from them to brainstorm more or look deeper into the issues.

Information management allows you to gather, analyze, coordinate and distribute the data as required to support design choices/solutions and maintain good working relationships.  The ability to work with all team members to synthesize the resulting product data into useful and agreeable guidelines will then allow for the creation of the appropriate product design attributes

The tools referred to in this case are not the design, development and testing tools familiar to product developers, but the tools required to investigate, collect and analyze the product requirement information.  These tools are actually very simple… they are communications tools (phones, Internet, video) and data manipulation and presentation programs such as word processors, spreadsheets, etc.  The product developer should be very adept with such tools.

Structures that the product developer needs are basic business and human resource support.  Examples are:

• Support by top management that has been clearly communicated throughout the company
• Open and honest communications paths between groups at all levels
• Good connections with regulatory agencies, legal representatives, contract manufacturers and suppliers
• Financial support to execute the strategy
• Appropriate facilities and tools (previous item) to execute the strategy