Electronics Development Is Broken. It's Time for a Reset.
Electronics are booming, but outdated methods can't keep up. Read more to discover the three principles transforming how development teams collaborate.
02 Oct, 2025. 4 minutes read
Electronics are everywhere. From electric vehicles to medical devices and consumer tech, our world increasingly depends on them. Yet, the way we create these systems hasn’t kept pace with their complexity and demands to bring products to market more quickly. While the products themselves demand multidisciplinary team collaboration, the methods used to develop them remain largely stuck in outdated information silos and reliant on manual communication.
But rapid industry transformation comes with mounting pressure. Rising complexity, fractured collaboration, and relentless time-to-market demands are stretching traditional development processes and tools beyond their breaking points.
The Growing Complexity Problem
Electronics products have always required a blend of disciplines — electrical, mechanical, software, supply chain, and requirements management. What has changed is the scale and distribution of that complexity. Today’s teams are often global, supply chains are volatile, and every decision is interdependent with sourcing, manufacturing, and regulatory pressures. It’s not the complexity of the products alone that strains organizations, but the growing complexity of the development process itself. Each new dependency — whether it’s a distributed team or a fragile supplier — introduces risk and potential delay.
Consider the semiconductor shortage that began in 2020: analyses by Goldman Sachs estimated it disrupted at least 169 industries worldwide and even reduced global GDP by nearly 1% in 2021. McKinsey further reported that the shortage halted automotive assembly lines and forced manufacturers to rethink sourcing and resilience strategies across the value chain. This wasn’t just a supply chain hiccup—it exposed how, when one part of the ecosystem falters, electronics development systems can suddenly become fragile and fragmented.
Why the Old Way No Longer Works
Most engineering teams still rely on meetings, long email threads, and disconnected tools to keep projects moving. While that can work for small projects, it creates enormous inefficiencies at scale.
A Forrester study found that engineers lose on average 159 hours per year to inefficient project management tasks—nearly a full month of productivity lost per person (Forrester/Altium study). That’s time not spent on design, innovation, or problem-solving.
The Human Cost of Collaboration Silos
Beyond lost time and dollars, collaboration silos take a human toll. When engineers work in isolation, they gradually lose sight of how their contributions fit into the bigger picture. Procurement may not understand the intent behind a design decision. Manufacturing is left to discover problems once they’re already expensive—and sometimes impossible—to fix.
The outcome is more than just project delays. This dynamic leads to a steady accumulation of frustration and disengagement. Engineers feel they are constantly reworking issues that could have been prevented. Procurement teams scramble to source parts under pressure, rather than partnering proactively. Compliance officers become “gatekeepers” instead of partners, which can create tension rather than teamwork. And when manufacturing is forced to raise red flags late in the process, it fuels a cycle of blame.
For electronics companies, these dynamics have tangible consequences. A missed compliance step can trigger a costly product recall. A late sourcing problem can stall an entire launch. A failure to align manufacturing and design can lead to yield losses or expensive redesigns. In a competitive industry where speed and quality are everything, these aren’t just inefficiencies—they are existential risks.
Why Electronics Development Needs a Reset
The industry doesn’t just need more tools—it needs a reset in how teams work together. At the heart of that reset are three principles that shift the paradigm for how electronics development teams work together.
The first is continuous insight: visibility that flows as work happens, not just during scheduled reviews. Instead of waiting for the next meeting to uncover issues, teams stay aligned in real time, with context available to everyone making decisions or taking action.
The second is true co-creation: disciplines working together to solve problems more effectively, rather than passing files across silos and counting on someone else to deal with it. This means electrical engineers, mechanical designers, software developers, and procurement specialists contributing in the same environment, seeing the same data, and making decisions as a unified team.
The third is a networked model of collaboration: the ability to bring in the right expertise at the right moment without being blocked by rigid hand-offs. Input from system engineers, manufacturing, or sourcing no longer arrives as an interruption—it becomes an organic and enriching part of the development process.
This reset isn’t just about moving faster. It’s about creating smarter, faster ways of working. These new ways can keep pace with the complexity of modern electronics while also unlocking the creativity of the people creating them.
A New Way Forward
Electronics development has outgrown the old functional silos, email chains, and after-the-fact reviews. What’s needed now is a reset—one that puts continuous insight, shared context, and true co-creation at the center of how teams work.
This shift is already underway. With solutions like Altium Develop, multidisciplinary teams can begin working in new ways—bringing design, supply chain, compliance, and manufacturing together on a shared platform built for co-creation.
For now, one thing is clear: organizations that embrace this reset will be the ones shaping the future of electronics.