An Alternative To Planning Your Physical Prototype
You don’t need a Gantt chart to plan your prototype builds. This alternative approach is a simpler way to map out your strategy without an endless list of activities with hard deadlines.
Not many people like to plan, especially planning something that has so many unknowns and things that can go wrong such a building a product. It is a daunting task and takes so much of your time at the beginning of your project.
I’ve made lots of useless plans
During my professional career in product design and manufacturing, I had to plan a lot of projects, using simple spreadsheets, Gantt charts, and many other planning tools. List every single activity that was involved in the project and give them a specific date in the future. Obviously all good guesses.
It was painful
It didn’t make sense to me to give a date to something so unpredictable and based on so little information at the start. I ended up not worrying about what I wrote in the plan knowing that I will go back and change it a few dozen times until some manager agrees and then we could actually start building something … and missing project deadlines.
“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”
― Benjamin Franklin
Don’t get me wrong, I am not against planning, I am actually a very methodical person (I am an engineer after all). However, I am in favor of smart planning and focusing on what brings actual value instead of generating waste.
Map out chunks of work
A better approach to plan your product development is to split your product in versions that you will deliver before it is ready for mass production.
Slice your product in versions
In order to split your product in different versions, you need to define how your product will evolve through the development, the levels of maturity of your product. Think about how your product will evolve from a basic functional version to a fully-featured version in small increments that will be built.
Organize your builds
Each version that you have previously defined will correspond to an actual product that you will build. So, you can now map out the different builds in sequence.
We have created a tool that will help you map your strategy. We call it Build Plan and it is a simple one-pager with all that you need to know to keep track of your product development.
Define your goals
To get started, the very first thing to do is to identify the purpose of your build so you can choose the right approach and the suitable technologies and resources to achieve it. The approach will differ, whether your goal is to test the technology in your product, or to recreate the final design aspect and aesthetics, or to validate the feasibility of your product.
Assign goals to each build
You can then assign a particular goal that you want to achieve to each build. This will help you focus your design and development efforts for each build and avoid trying to solve everything at once.
Choose the features to focus on
A way to define the goals for each build is to get the backlog of features that your product should include and start assigning them based on priorities. Simply start by building the highest priority features (or most risky) first and add the rest of the features to subsequent builds.
You can later adjust your goal and features to be built on the next builds based on the feedback that you get from previous builds. This allows for a flexible plan instead of having to remake the whole plan because inputs or assumptions changed.
Time-frame your builds
Setting deadlines for every single activity which are linked to one another means that when one deadline is missed the following deadlines in the plan are already affected.
Avoid useless deadlines
Instead, do it backward, define a time-frame in which you will be able to design and build the product version and elaborate the activities at the beginning of each build that will allow you to meet the goal in that time-frame.
Contemplate key relevant dates
If relevant enough, just mark any key dates that you think are critical for the project, such as events, trade shows, exhibitions,…. Aim to release a product version that meets your goals for that event date. Add some buffer if necessary.
Identify external Resources
In order to perform the activities required to bring your idea from a concept to a physical product version on each of the builds, you will need to consider certain resources such as skilled professionals and services.
Look for the skills that you are missing
You can always do this on your own if you have the skills and time to dedicate yourself. In any case, listing the skills required will allow you to at least have a think on what you will require for the builds to be completed and be prepared in advance.
Consider the costs of each build
If you need to hire someone or some service to design and fabricate your product version, estimate the costs that you will incur so you can anticipate the expenses beforehand. You may want to prepare for some capital injection as the product gets into production and investment is required for tooling, equipment, and materials.
Anticipate your potential costs
Fabricating your product version will have a cost unless you can do it by your own means and even so you will likely need to purchase some materials. Consider the cost of materials and labor time if you are building your product elsewhere. Bear in mind that this is the cost of the build version which is different from your final product’s production cost.
Focus on what’s important and do not waste your time planning
I have shown you how you can map out your product development by defining a series of builds to create improved versions of your product. Using this approach will let you focus just on the tasks that will help you achieve the goal for each product version within its time-boxed build.
Map out your build strategy and build with purpose.
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Abilista guides innovators to develop their product ideas from concept, prototyping and all the way to manufacturing following our own step by step framework. We are already helping several entrepreneurs and startups to build their ideas by giving them access to simple and agile tools and expertise on-demand.
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