Digitalisation in Product Development: From Data to Decisions

From data to decisions: what digitalisation really means for product development

Everywhere you look, digitalisation and AI are reshaping how products are designed, tested, and built. From Augmented Reality (AR) to data-driven automation, the promise is faster, clearer, more connected development. At MMID, we’ve learned progress doesn’t come from using more tools, it comes from making better decisions. We adopt digital methods that help teams align earlier, verify faster, and reduce rework. If a tool doesn’t do that, we move on.

On stage at Essen digitalisiert 2025: using AR to decide earlier

At Essen digitalisiert 2025, our colleague Christoph Berndt joined our client Stack & Track to share how AR accelerates decision-making in product development. By placing a design directly in its real environment, all stakeholders can see, evaluate, and improve a concept before production starts. The real value isn’t the technology itself but the clarity it creates: everyone talks about the same thing, at the same scale. That replaces uncertainty with shared understanding and speeds up product management decisions.

Field notes from ISPE 2025: data as the backbone of innovation

A few days later, ISPE 2025 confirmed the same shift in pharma and biotech: systems are becoming fully connected, and data sits at the center. Teams focus on traceability from concept to production, fewer late surprises, and stronger alignment across disciplines. Our colleague Landon’s takeaway was simple, digitalisation creates value when it helps teams decide faster and with more confidence.

What this means for product development

Across industries, one insight stands out: digitalisation is valuable only when it supports better decisions. Most teams aren’t asking for more dashboards, they’re asking for clarity. What exactly are we designing? How will it be used? When is a design ready to move forward? Digital tools help when they turn uncertainty into visible, measurable outcomes.

How we make it practical at MMID

Visualise early to align faster

Together with Stack & Track, we brought AR into the development flow to place a design in its actual environment so stakeholders could see, evaluate, and iterate before production. The result: less ambiguity, better alignment, and faster decisions throughout product management.

Design hardware that learns

We design for reliability and usability, and for the future. That means enabling the right data capture from day one for testing and later optimisation. Useful data becomes part of the product, not an afterthought.

How MMID can help you

For us, digitalisation isn’t a separate track, it brings clarity to each step of development. At Essen we showed how AR speeds up alignment and reduces rework; at ISPE we exchanged insights with a sector rapidly connecting everything through data. Different environments, same lesson: use digital tools where they make human decisions easier and more confident.