Product analysis involves examining product features, costs, availability, quality, appearance and other aspects. Product analysis is conducted by potential buyers, by product managers attempting to understand competitors and by third party reviewers.
Product analysis can also be used as part of product design to convert a high-level product description into project deliverables and requirements. It involves all facts of the product, its purpose, its operation, and its characteristics.
Related techniques include product breakdown, systems analysis, systems engineering, value engineering, value analysis and functional analysis.
Product breakdown: Recursively divide the product into components and subcomponents.
Strategic intelligenceSituational awarenessInnovation management and Category:Technological comparisons
Technological analysis is sometimes applied in decision-making often related to investments, policy-decisions and public spending. They can be done by a variety of organization-types such as for-profit companies, non-profit think tanks, research institutes, public platforms and government agencies and evaluate established, emerging and potential future technologies on a variety of measures and metrics – all of which are related to ideals and goals such as minimal global greenhouse gas emissions – such as life-cycle-sustainability, openness, performance, control, financial costs, resource costs, health impacts and more. Results are sometimes published as public reports or as scientific peer-reviewed studies. Based on such reports standardization can enable interventions or efforts which balance competition and cooperation and improve sustainability, reduce waste and redundancy, or accelerate innovation. They can also be used for the creation of standardized system designs that integrate a variety of technologies as their components. Other applications include risk assessment and research of defense applications. They can also be used or created for determining the hypothetical or existing optimal solution/s and to identify challenges, innovation directions and applications.