Innovation and development efforts are particularly challenging for complex products such as automobiles or airplanes, which involve thousands of engineers spending years designing, testing, and integrating hundreds of thousands of parts before the new product reaches the market. Key issues in these product development processes involve matching the organization to the complex product being developed and managing geographic distribution of new product design efforts. We study the impact of mismatches between product structure and communication patterns, and the role of globally distributed design on product development performance.