How Product Development and Curling Share a Winning Path to Success

What does sliding a heavy stone across a sheet of ice have in common with product manufacturing? At first glance, the sport of curling and product development might seem worlds apart. However, as we discussed at a recent networking event, the two fields share a surprising blueprint for success. Whether on the rink or in the office, both require a dedicated team to align on a specific target, manage constantly shifting conditions in real-time, and execute their strategy with absolute transparency to reach the “house” successfully.

Driving Product Success Through Cross-Functional Collaboration

In curling, the skip directs the play and calls the shots, but the success of the throw depends entirely on the sweepers and the thrower working in perfect harmony. This dynamic closely mirrors the challenge many product and quality leaders face on a daily basis: driving results across various departments where they completely lack direct authority.

How Do You Manage Competing Priorities with Cross-Functional Teamwork?

Teamwork is the bedrock of this entire process. In a complex organization, different teams often have competing priorities that can cause friction. Engineering might be heavily focused on rapid innovation and new features, while operations focuses on throughput, and quality focuses on compliance. Susan Helvig, Senior Quality Systems Engineer at IMRIS, notes that in these cross-functional environments, she must rely heavily on trust and shared standards to keep things moving. Emphasizing the importance of trusting the team to maintain quality standards without micromanagement, Helvig states, “You also have to trust that your team is trying to do the best they can and follow the process as best they can.”

Build Cross-Functional Alignment by Understanding Team Priorities

Understanding the unique perspectives of different team members is equally vital to driving results. Erik Reynolds, Director of Engineering at Digi International, addresses this challenge by putting himself in other department heads’ shoes before requesting modifications. He explains that he tries to understand the priorities of different team members to “grease the skids” for any necessary change. “I personally try and think of where they are going to be coming from when I propose this change that is going to perhaps be met with resistance,” he says, noting that accompanying requests with factual data helps bridge the gap between departments.

Getting on the Same Page When Priorities Shift

Just as curlers must constantly manage changing ice conditions—adjusting their sweeping techniques to account for friction and moisture and guide the stone—product teams must navigate shifting market demands, supply chain issues, and internal pivots.

How Can Product Teams Leverage Collaboration Tools to Maintain Alignment?

Transparency and clear communication are the primary tools for staying on target during these shifts. At IMRIS, the team utilizes Arena Scribe to keep critical conversations directly tied to the work. Susan highlights that Scribe enables seamless back-and-forth communication within the module, preventing important details from getting lost in fragmented email chains, scattered Teams messages, or passing hallway conversations. When her team of two is suddenly tasked with releasing a product containing 8,000 BOM items while simultaneously managing a phase two production release, communicating priorities clearly across the company is the only way to survive.

How Can Engineering Teams Align Priorities During a Product Development Pivot?

When a pivot occurs, the first step is to clarify the new goal and align on the non-negotiables. Reynolds notes that at Digi, the engineering team settles on the absolute “must-haves”—typically customer impact, revenue, and quality. Once these core metrics are established and agreed upon, the rest of the project falls into line, ensuring the team isn’t simply “running open loop” and wasting valuable resources on the wrong tasks.

How to Course-Correct When Product Development Goes Off Target

Even the best-aimed stone can go off course during a curling match. Susan points out that in product development, friction frequently occurs during the messy phase of cross-functional reviews and manual redlining on external sites like SharePoint or via email, where information can often become disjointed. She emphasizes the importance of having a single source of truth in a system like Arena to create traceability and keep everyone on the same page.

Getting a Product Development Project Back on Track

When a project does veer off track midstream, the team must come together to understand exactly what changed rather than making individual assumptions. Erik advocates a highly data-driven reset to get everyone back on the same page. “We look at the data first and understand what changed, how we are going to address it, and then align the common business goals,” he explains. This focused approach prevents individual interpretations from leading the team further astray.

How Can Teams Maintain Product Quality When Project Priorities Change?

Maintaining consistent quality standards during these turbulent moments is not negotiable. Helvig explains that while the path to the goal may change, the underlying standards do not. Instead, the team focuses heavily on risk assessment. “If we assess that it’s not a risk we want to take, then, unfortunately, it’s going to take a little longer to address whatever the issue is,” she notes, reinforcing that following the process is essential even when timelines are tight.

Arena Brings Product Teams Together

Product teams, much like curling teams, consist of individuals with highly specialized roles who are deeply reliant on one another to succeed. To function effectively without dropping the ball, they need transparency.

Arena, PTC’s cloud-native product lifecycle management (PLM) and quality management system (QMS) solution serves as the single source of product truth, providing the visibility needed to keep everyone on the same page. Erik notes that at Digi, Arena PLM is the “guiding light” for the entire organization. Before adopting Arena, critical certification documentations, such as FCC, UL testing, and emissions reports, were scattered across various desktops, local servers, and random email attachments. Missing a certification renewal in a major market can cost a company at least six figures, making this scattered approach a massive liability. By centralizing all this critical compliance evidence in Arena, Digi achieved a revolutionary shift. They set up automated API calls to a customer-facing website, ensuring 100% visibility into product compliance and saving the engineering team countless hours of manual reporting.

Hitting the Target Through Teamwork and Transparency

Whether you are sweeping on the ice or managing complex product lifecycles in the office, success is ultimately defined by alignment, clear communication, and the ability to course-correct in real time. Product development is a team sport that requires every player to see the same information and work toward the same “house.”

By adopting a modern cloud-native solution like Arena, companies can move away from manual, paper-based systems—where obtaining physical signatures from six people was once required to survive an audit—and toward a streamlined, electronic source of truth. This centralized approach keeps the entire team moving forward together, no matter how rapidly conditions change.

Learn more about Arena’s unified PLM and QMS platform. Ready to see Arena in action? Request a demo today.