The challenge

Automotive Product Management runs on a planning rhythm that traditionally leans waterfall — long programme cycles, deep upstream planning, sequential reviews. But the work coming into a modern automotive PM team is no longer cleanly waterfall: software-defined vehicle features, electric and connected systems, supplier collaboration cycles, all create demand that needs faster delegation and shorter feedback loops.

Faurecia’s Product Management team needed a way to:

• Manage workload across a mixed-cadence backlog
• Share data consistently within the team and across handoffs
• Tighten the feedback loop between PM, engineering, and suppliers
• Get analytics on flow — what’s moving, what’s stuck, where the bottlenecks are
• Transition from traditional working patterns to Agile without forcing a hard switch on the whole organisation

The team specifically wanted a platform that could carry the transition, not just support one end of it.

The solution

SwiftKanban was deployed in 2018 as the workload management and flow visibility tool for the Product Management function. Notably, no other Lean/Agile project tool was in use — SwiftKanban was the single platform carrying the transition.

The deployment delivered three operational changes:

• Better task delegation — work assignments became explicit and visible, not implicit
• Faster completion — the visibility surfaced bottlenecks that manual tracking had hidden
• A smooth transition path from traditional to Agile — Product Management got Agile behaviours (visualised work, WIP discipline, pull-based flow) without needing a full methodology change first

The outcome

Two outcomes for Faurecia:

• Faster completion of work — better task delegation and visualised flow shortened the time work spent in-process
• Lower Lead Time — measurably shorter cycles from work-started to work-done