Societies have adapted to the highly digital world we are living in. This has yielded the need for new manners to satisfy their market needs. These societal needs can cascade as stakeholder needs. Customers seem to be more and more inclined to fast feedback, quasi-immediate results, and compromising less with performance-cost trade-offs. Digital Engineering Ecosystems (DEE) are meant to address the complexity and dynamism of modern product development. This paper reviews the elements and characteristics of ecosystems required to achieve an effective digital thread (DTH), presents an industrial example of a DEE and benefits on a discussion of the challenges that arise when setting up an effective DEE and how the goals may be company dependent.