Looking at all life stages of a product (Product life cycle (engineering)) is essential for design for X, otherwise the X may be suboptimized, or make no sense. When asking what competencies are required for analysing situations that may occur along the life of a product, it becomes clear that several departmental functions are required. An historical assumption is that new product development is conducted in a departmental-stage process (that can be traced back to the classical theory of the firm, e.g. Max Weber's bureaucracy or Henri Fayol's administration principles), i.e., new product development activities are closely associated with certain department of a firm.