Program and Technical Management on a Product-Driven Research Project

Managing a research project with a strong product development focus introduces a unique blend of challenges and opportunities—particularly when the project spans institutions, disciplines, and sectors. In this talk, we share lessons learned and effective strategies from our experience managing a large-scale, multi-institutional research effort with production, research, and commercialization objectives.

Our project is led by a major research university and involves collaboration across multiple departments, a federal agency, a leading clinical and research institution, and commercial partners. This structure introduces complex interdependencies, competing timelines, and varying institutional cultures and priorities.

We will explore how we navigate and balance:

* Timelines and Dependencies: Given both the research nature of the project and the product nature, how do we balance the dichotomy of research exploration versus product deliverables? 

* Cross-institutional Collaboration: Building trust and a shared vision among partners with differing missions, from academic inquiry to regulatory compliance to market readiness. Academic researchers often want to publish their work quickly, while industry will want to keep ideas closed until patents or other protections are in place. This is especially noticeable in the academy, which has a publish-or-perish mindset.

* Leadership and Management Layers: Clarifying roles and maintaining alignment across product owners, principal investigators, project managers, and engineering leads, while ensuring transparent decision-making and communication.

* Production vs. Research Tensions: Ensuring software and systems meet real-world reliability and usability standards, while supporting exploratory research and iteration. With academia looking at publications, code is sometimes rushed and not fully production-ready. Which team hardens the system?

* Commercialization Pathways: Integrating commercial perspectives early in the research lifecycle and managing intellectual property, regulatory, and operational constraints. This is critical to be done early in the project to prevent anyone feeling left out, or feeling like their ideas are stolen.

We will share tools, processes, and communication strategies that have helped us manage this complexity, including structured program management frameworks, collaborative roadmapping practices, and lightweight but effective governance models.