Product development is an iterative process, partially due to changes in both company internal and external product requirements, resulting in changes to the product under development. These changes might require recapitulation of design rationale and result in re-doing assessments and syntheses of different kinds. One way to support this work is to proactively model in such a way that as much as possible of the previous work can be re-used. Modelling for re-use can be done by documenting design rationale and formalising performed activities as design guidelines or computer scripts. To be able to find and effectively re-use design activities, the added support could be attached to or otherwise linked to the product features they relate to. This paper focuses on the native CAD-models which also has been utilized by others as carriers of information for different purposes. For instance, describes the use of annotations on CAD-models, an example is presented where both FEM and CAM specifics were added to the geometry enabling automatic FEA and blank casting geometry creation. The approach was later used to support both constraint based redesign activities and encapsulation of in-development/in-service information for throughout product lifecycle retrieval.