PDMA Connections - April 2025

We invite you to become a key sponsor of the PDMA 2025 Ignite Innovation Summit, taking place September 13–16, 2025, at the Marriott Marquis Chicago. As a sponsor, your organization will connect with top product leaders, executives, and innovators from diverse industries, positioning your brand at the forefront of cutting-edge product development and management.

Our sponsorship and exhibitor opportunities are designed to maximize attendee engagement with your company, ensuring your brand is prominently featured throughout the event. Secure your sponsorship today and be part of an event that shapes the future of product development and management!

PDMA’s Global Student Innovation Challenge 2025 submission portal is now open and ready to receive your innovation ideas!

The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) is pleased to offer the 6th annual Global Student Innovation Challenge. This challenge encourages and supports students developing novel, real-world offerings—including products, software, or services. Students currently enrolled full-time at a university academic program, either in an undergraduate or graduate level, are eligible to participate. The top three finalist teams will be invited to present their projects as part of the PDMA International Inspire Innovation Conference, September 13-16, 2025 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. You can review the rules and guidelines of the challenge, as well as videos of the winning teams from previous years, on our website. Please thoroughly review the rubric to ensure you meet all the criteria.

The submission portal is now accepting applications with a deadline of June 1, 2025.

Incorporating patient advocacy into the product design process is essential for creating solutions that truly address patient needs. This 60-minute webinar offers an introduction to empathy-first innovation, demonstrating how to seamlessly integrate patient advocates into your development journey. Through a real-world case study of a medical device that revolutionized postpartum care, you'll gain insights into practical techniques for problem scoping, crafting empathy statements, and defining user needs.

In this engaging and forward-thinking webinar, discover how the PDMA partnered with AMS to revolutionize their approach to innovation through Voice of Customer (VOC) research. By gathering insights from both members and non-members, PDMA was able to tap into the true needs of their community and better understand the evolving demands of professional organizations. AMS leveraged its cutting-edge, fine-tuned Large Language Model (LLM) to extract detailed customer needs with unprecedented accuracy and speed, demonstrating its ability to match the performance of trained human analysts.

We are thrilled to announce the launch of the Nashville Chapter of the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA)—a new hub for innovation, collaboration, and professional growth in product development and management.

The PDMA Nashville Chapter strives to build a diverse and inclusive community of practitioners, academics, researchers, and service providers that share experiences and knowledge of the principles, practices, and processes of effective product innovation and product life cycle. Participation in this community will result in professional growth for individuals, an innovation related competitive advantage for their organizations, and the continued economic growth and talent development of the Nashville Metropolitan Region. As an all-volunteer organization, we are always welcoming talented and enthusiastic people to help us plan and execute our regular events and grow in innovative and positive ways. Whether individuals are currently working in this field or are planning to, the PDMA Nashville Chapter aims to provide opportunities to participate and grow within the product and professional spaces. It is our goal to continue to grow our strong network of local product developers and managers while providing leadership opportunities to the next generation.

Please join us in welcoming the inaugural board of the PDMA Nashville Chapter:
• Brett Woodall – Chapter President
• Kristine Lockhart – Vice President
• Naveena Dommaraju – Treasurer
• Joseph Gordon – Programs Chair
• Tristen Cox – Communications Chair

We’re excited to begin this journey and look forward to engaging with product leaders, innovators, and change-makers across the region. Stay tuned for upcoming events and ways to get involved!

For more information or to connect with the chapter, please visit us on LinkedIn or our chapter website.

Let’s build something great—together.

Recent kHUB Postings:

For large, established companies, driving innovation is more than a strategic priority, it’s a necessity for survival in competitive and fast-changing markets. Yet, fostering innovation in a legacy organization can be a daunting task, especially when cultural inertia stands in the way. This article, From Resistance to Reinvention: Overcoming Cultural Barriers to Transform Innovation Capability by guest contributor Noel Sobelman draws from his experiences working with global companies that have undertaken the bold initiative to transform their innovation capabilities and provides practical insights into overcoming the culture and behavior challenges that stand in the way of change.
For most companies, one of the most important and uncertain tipping points in a product life cycle is the transition from business strategy to product requirements. Purposeful NPD: Designing Your Product Strategy—a recent webcast presented by John Eaton shares how to leverage Design Thinking as a key element of product strategy to drive innovation and improve overall new product development. After all, leadership's key role and responsibility to guide the organization is to articulate a destination, estimate the cost and time for the best path to get there, and provide enough evidence to stakeholders that it's worth the journey. On the other hand, Product Managers are typically put in charge of logistics: Balance the needs and journey of the end user, identify the role of the customer or brokers in the middle, navigate the competitive landscape, assess the technical lift for the team, etc. It’s at this juncture that PMs lead the trade-offs among desirability, feasibility, and viability, and comprehend how the cumulative effects of design, engineering, manufacturing, and sales will ultimately make their product’s path to market a success.
Guest contributor Jake McKee continues his series about Community-Driven Product Development (CDPD). Traditional product development often operates in a vacuum. Teams work behind closed doors, making assumptions about what customers want, only to find out after launch whether they got it right. This outdated approach leads to missed opportunities, costly revisions, and products that struggle to resonate with users. By integrating customer insights throughout the entire process—from ideation to launch, instead of relying solely on internal expertise—companies leverage real-world feedback to refine products, align with market needs, and create stronger customer relationships. Take a closer look at how CDPD delivers real business impact in his article Why Community-Driven Product Development (CDPD) Creates Better Products.
The kHUB curators have been looking into the TED Talk archives to recommend some related to innovation. Creativity, searching for innovative ideas, pursuit of new products or services… How can we promote the collective and creative mind in design teams? This Viewpoint blog post by curator Carlos Rodriguez, Creativity and the Collective Mind, challenges our views regarding mental spaces, diversity of thinking, self-awareness, and self-reflection as pillars of innovation and impact in the designer’s mind.

kHUB Most Popular Content:

See what your competitors and peers have viewed in kHUB recently. The following content is among the most accessed last month:

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PDMA is growing! Meet and connect with our new members by signing into the PDMA community on our website.

PDMA welcomed these new members in March 2025. We look forward to working with you!

Individual Members

Pravin Asar
Ramya Boorugula
Ben Campbell
Rogerio de Jesus
Drummond de Souza
Abhishek Dhawan
Randy Falkenrath
Joshua Johnson
David Lanter
Nicola Lippi
Heather Lum
Marko Mandac
Richard Mander
Lizzy Mangold
Mohamed Mostafa
Ayman Naeim
Tolulope Oluwatudimu
Kevin Paulson
Stan Ponder
Tami Reiss
Charles Russell
Rajendran S P
Irene Sims
Emily Stephens
Kishore Bellamkonda
Sunderajulu
Neha Takawale
Brett Woodall
Xiaotong Zhao

Student Member
Yan Li

Academic Members
Yang Huizhong
Junjie Min
Kimiaki Suzuki

Know a product, software, or system that exemplifies user-centered design excellence? Nominate it for the prestigious 24th Annual Stanley Caplan User-Centered Design Award! Winners receive a trophy, a $1,000 honorarium, and industry recognition through HFES promotions and Ergonomics in Design. Open to physical products, software, and systems in use within the past three years, nominations are accepted from individuals or teams. Submit your Nomination Form here by April 30. Interested in judging or volunteering? Get involved here or learn more at www.ucdAward.com. Let’s celebrate innovation that puts users first!