Market needs and customer expectations on new products grow continuously, which increases the requirements on the product engineers and designers. Respectively, is becomes real challenge to educate engineering students theoretically by studding contemporary methods and techniques in design and practically mastering skills in multi-disciplinary product development process. The presented paper is meant to introduce an experiment in teaching Product development course for Mechanical engineering students at Linnaeus University (LNU). After teaching the course in several years we experience that, teaching creativity, critical thinking and decision making by presenting different tools and techniques, could be hard to make it inspiring enough for the students. During the fall semester of 2014 a decision was taken to re-design the course by shifting some of the activities and responsibilities from the teacher to the students. They were involved in delivering and clarifying the theory by summarizing the lectures. Students have an active role in working on industrial projects and presenting the results achieved. The individual apprizing based on the group members contribution was also a students' responsibility. There were benefits but also some problems which will be discussed in this paper. The conclusion made after this experiment reflected in the course planning for the next years.