Many products, a long-established history, a portfolio rich in variants – and countless challenges to maintain order in the chaos. This is the daily balancing act faced by SEBTEC, a company that is fictional on one hand – and yet all too real on the other.
Because in some way, we are all SEBTEC when we ask ourselves whether things couldn’t be done better. Why do we keep generating effort and costs with every portfolio adjustment, every new development, every QA issue—just to figure out the current status? Which function is in which product, for which customer, or what impact a certain change would have.
So let's ask ourselves - What would SEBTEC do?
SEBTEC is our mirror
SEBTEC has been successfully developing technical products for over 20 years, bringing eight product generations to market. What once began with manageable variants has evolved over the years into a complex product portfolio comprising 15 products in five product families with a total of 250 variants. Technological advances, increasing customer demands, and internal efficiency requirements have promoted this development – but at the same time have also led to significant structural problems.
The Challenge: Complexity without System
Despite its technological success, SEBTEC is currently facing a number of challenges:
High requirements, little structure: 80% of the requirements are the same across all products, 10% apply within product families, and only 10% are product-specific. Nevertheless, these requirements are not managed centrally, but rather maintained decentrally in different projects.
Copy & Paste instead of ReUse
Requirements are traditionally duplicated manually, and documents are created multiple times – an approach that has, over the years, led to redundancies, inconsistencies, and dependencies that are difficult to trace.
Lack of traceability
Changes to requirements are difficult – if not impossible – to assess in terms of their impact on other products. Impact analyses are time-consuming and error-prone.
Changes - the trap of complexity
Even minor changes – such as to a core function – result in disproportionately high effort, as it is unclear which variants and products are affected.
Technically driven requirements management
The role of the requirements engineer is assumed by project managers who are highly technically oriented. As a result, customer needs and business perspectives are neglected.
No active variants management
The multitude of product variants is managed passively – rather than actively controlled – leading to increased maintenance efforts, friction losses, and a lack of transparency.
The solution: Feature-Based Product Engineering (FBPE)
FBPE offers SEBTEC a structured, sustainable approach to reducing complexity in product and requirements management. The central idea: Products are no longer described by individual requirements, but rather by features – functional units that can be consistently described, reused, and varied.
What is a feature
A feature is a functional encapsulation that describes a specific capability or property of a product. Features are modular in structure, described independently of one another, and can be designed as variants (e.g., "communication via Bluetooth" vs. "communication via Wi-Fi").
Products are not traced to requirements, but to features. The requirements, use cases, and tests then belong to a feature as documentation, not to a product. This enables reusability and clear structuring.
How FBPE specifically addresses SEBTEC's challenges
Modularity replaces Redundancy
Structuring the portfolio into features creates a clear separation between generic, family-specific, and product-specific properties. Redundant requirements are eliminated, and key requirements are defined and referenced once.
Reuse instead of new documentation
Once defined, features can be reused across different products—along with all associated requirements, test cases, and use cases. This saves effort, increases consistency, and improves quality.
Structured variant creation
Instead of passively emerging variants (unplanned, historically developed), FBPE allows for a targeted variant strategy. Features can be defined in different forms (e.g., light/full/custom) that are deliberately used in products.
Improved traceability and impact analysis
Because products reference features, changes to a feature make it immediately clear which products are affected. This drastically reduces the analysis effort required for changes and increases decision-making speed.
Separation of problem space, solution space and technology
FBPE helps keep abstraction levels clean. The original customer requirement (problem space) remains separate from the functional solution (solution space) and the technical implementation (technology). This makes the architecture clearer and keeps changes localized.
Role clarification and focus
FBPE relieves the burden on technical project managers by shifting the requirements definition to a new, focused role of feature owners or feature architects. These people mediate between stakeholders, technology, and business—a key prerequisite for sustainable product development.
The key to success: modularization of the product architecture
Modularization through features is not only methodologically advantageous, but also economically viable. Targeted reuse reduces development, testing, and maintenance costs. At the same time, agility increases: New product variants can be configured more quickly, and new requirements can be integrated more quickly – without disrupting the system's balance.
The next step: SEBTEC on the path to transformation
SEBTEC has given the go-ahead. As part of a comprehensive portfolio redesign, the existing architecture will be consolidated and converted to a feature-based approach. The goal is to manage the diversity of variants, leverage synergies, and sustainably modernize the development landscape.
Feature-Based Product Engineering is not just a method – it is a strategic lever for sustainable product development.+
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With methods@lab und methods@work, we have developed the methodologies to support companies like SEBTEC in realigning their product development processes.
With tailor-made training, coaching offers and the active introduction of FBPE structures, we support companies like SEBTEC in the realignment of their product development processes.