Take Your Product Idea From Concept To Manufacturing With This Simple Framework
Discover our approach for building prototypes using 4-week cycles that can get your product ready for manufacturing in just 6 months while saving 50% of development costs.
This is Part 3 of a 3 part series on how to build your product idea. These are the links to the other 2 parts Part 1 (Discovering a new way) and Part 2 (Our approach).
After defining your idea details and structuring an overall build plan in the second part of this article, you should now be ready to start executing your Product Builds (PBs).
Using Product Builds
The way you should go about starting your builds is, first and most importantly, to go one step at a time, focus on one build and set up the context of the build.
Explore
Similar to the Idea Brief, we have created a one-pager for your PBs, the Build Canvas. Fill in one at the beginning of each PB so goals and expectations are clear and everybody is on the same page.
- Revise and define specific goals prior to each build. Here is where the second pillar of our approach (Goal driven builds) is put into practice. The PB goal has to be more specific and focused on what exactly you want to achieve in this PB. Goals have to be meaningful so that they will provide an answer to a question about the product, either technical, related to the user or even related to the business.
- Define features to meet the goals. Based on the goals and on what you are trying to achieve in this particular PB, you will list the set of features that relates to that goal. They would be usually some or even all of the features defined in the Idea Brief.
- Identify suitable tests for the features. In order to verify that the goals are met, you should identify how would you best test the prototype at the end of the build. Tests could be very simple in some cases, especially in the earlier versions, identify the simplest way to test the features.
- Define requirements and specs. The requirements will be also very much linked to the features chosen and therefore could easily be transferred directly from the list in the Idea Brief.
- List the required materials and estimated costs. Each PB will require some materials to be ordered or consumed in order to fabricate the prototype. Make sure to list the items, materials, components or other samples that you will need to build the prototype, even if this is done completely by an external service it will help you to understand what’s needed and estimate what would be the cost to build it.
As you can see, the benefit of having done some previous work in the Idea Brief and Build Plan is that some of the information above has been generated already and you just need to transfer it to the Build Canvas. Therefore you just need to complete or adapt the rest based on the current goals and the insights that you have gathered from previous PBs.
Design
With a clear goal for the PB, the design activities can take place. This is likely the most time-consuming part of the build and where a lot of back and forth with the product design happens. Depending on which product level you are at, there will more focus on certain activities than others.
Below is a map of the most common activities during the design as the product moves from early levels (left) to production (right). This is not necessarily in sequential order, based on the third pillar of our approach (Full technical consideration), it is essential that you consider all the technical aspects of the product. Even if it seems too early to define specifications, inspection requirements, Bill of Materials and product costs, treating the prototype design as if it was going to be taken to mass production and capturing how you anticipate this to happen will raise risks and issues and let you think on alternatives early on which will be extremely helpful as you progress in the development.
As you can see there is a central item in which all of these activities rely on in one way or the other, which is a skilled professional. This could either be yourself if you have the necessary skills, some friend or someone you know with those skills, or an external professional such a freelancer or design firm. No matter who takes this role, and it can be more than one professional, the design activities will be handled by him with your own inputs defined in your Idea Brief Canvas and Build Canvas. Some common professionals used in the design of physical products include,
- Industrial Designers. Highly skilled in conceptual design, coming up with innovative ideas to resolve problems, good knowledge of materials and aesthetics aspects and a great sense for what the product should evoke to the user.
- Mechanical Engineers. More technical and mostly focused on the internal workings of the product, knowledge of mechanical systems, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, structural analysis, production processes, how components are assembled together and material properties.
- Electronic Engineers. If your product has some electronics, you will need specific engineers to handle that part. Knowledge of circuit boards design, sensors, and wireless communication, controllers programming, power consumption management, requirements for electrical product certifications.
- Production Engineers. Focused on production tooling and jigs design, production flow arrangement and optimization, quality control, production capacities, and planning.
If you need to hire one of these skilled professionals, here it is a list of considerations that will help you decide what is the best fit for your project:
- Skills. As listed above identify which professional you need. Then make sure you further filter based on skills needed, such as conceptual design, plastic injection molding, fabrics specialist, fluids expert, firmware engineer among many others.
- Budget & Lead time. Make sure you define a budget and a deadline based on the activities that you are requesting. You don’t want to spend half your budget on a task that should be a couple of hours work for a specialist, and you don’t want to get no one interested or low-quality profiles due to a very low budget. So understanding how long certain tasks might take is crucial, and you might need someone with the knowledge to give you advice on that.
- References. Check out references of their previous work to see if there is a match with the skills you need.
- Communication. Make sure you contact them before hiring anyone to see if the language is not a barrier and how you will be communicating throughout the project.
- Technical files. Define exactly the list of deliverables that you will need from them, documentation and also files, such as 3D models, files for 3D printing, 2D drawings and so on. Choose for example a single 3D software that they will work with so you don’t get files in different formats.
- Scope of Work. Be concrete in what you want them to do, and as mentioned before which deliverables you are expecting from them.
- Contract. If you want to be safe, use some sort of contract with the above information and include intellectual property protection clauses. You can simply use one of the thousands of standard templates online, or if you use a freelancer site they have their own already.
Check the resources section below for links to freelancers sites and design resources.
Build
After the design activities, or even while some of the design is being finalized, you will fabricate the prototype. The build involves a series of activities that I represent in the following map:
A seen before, activities on the left are related to earlier product levels with more emphasis on rapid prototyping and user feedback and as we move to the right, the emphasis is put on production related activities. But again, all manufacturing considerations should be taken into account at any PB. For example, try to simulate the assembly steps, jigs, and quality controls as if it was done in a production line environment even with earlier prototypes. And don’t forget to test your prototypes.
The central item, in this case, are the suppliers or services used to fabricate and assemble the prototypes and components. In earlier prototypes, this could be handled by yourself if you have some tools or equipment with you, such as 3D printers, or you could use external makerspaces that have this sort of equipment. However, as you move into production, you will need to look for suppliers to purchase your components and fabricate your custom parts and assembly your final product. It might require some knowledge to know which suppliers or services are best suited for your product, here are some considerations:
- Capabilities. Make sure you choose the right service or supplier based on their capabilities. Which tools and types of equipment they have, which services they offer, which products or components they commonly fabricate.
- Quotes & Lead time. When sourcing for services and suppliers there is some work involved in requesting quotes to a bunch of them. Be consistent on what you ask for in their quotes so you can compare apples to apples between different suppliers, for example, if it includes shipment fees, packaging for transportation, payment terms, lead times of orders among others.
- Clients. Ask for references of current client’s work to check the quality they deliver and the products they work with.
- Communication channels. Communication, especially with suppliers around the world, is very important. Make sure you agree on which channels are most efficient for communication and ask for a single point of contact and their superior levels contacts.
- Technical Documentation. Agree with them on which technical documentation they need to fabricate and manufacture your prototype or product. It is important to use a system that can help you easily track which version of the documentation they are using to avoid common mistakes.
- Payment terms. This is an important aspect of production suppliers since favorable payment terms can make a big difference for your product success. It is not the same to pay material orders upfront that 60 days after delivery.
- Contracts & NDAs. With suppliers, contracts are a must have in order to establish the right terms of cooperation during your development and production. In particular, Non Disclosure Agreements (NDAs), are essential when you start conversations and sharing your product details with them.
Check the resources section below for links to on-demand services, fabrication spaces, and suppliers marketplaces.
Below is a simple illustration of how you would continuously evolve your product through Product Builds and the described activities within each PB.
Resources
As part of the fourth and last pillar of our approach (Dynamic and agile tools and resources), we have already presented some of our own agile tools to guide you, such as the Idea Brief Canvas, the Build Plan and the Build Canvas, which are available for you to use here. In Abilista we have also created many other similar tools included as part of our services to guide you on the development journey.
Besides those, here are some of the resources that will help you work in a more agile way through your development.
Freelancer websites
Design resources
- Onshape (CAD software and resources)
- 3D printing
- Prototyping guide (from Abilista)
On-demand prototyping services
On-demand packaging
Fabrication spaces
Sourcing
Product testing
- Testing guide (from Abilista)
Abilista resources
Final thoughts
I have described to you the way to use and implement the Product Builds following our approach. Hopefully, you get to see the benefits of using time-boxed builds, not for the sake of simply going fast, but essentially so you won’t keep dragging the design and build activities forever until you have reached something perfect that in turn is not what users want. It will also help to align the work of everyone that is involved in the project and help you have better control over the development activities. That is the reason why it is better to limit the PBs to about 4 weeks, even if you take a “long” break between PBs to have the time to evaluate the feedback gathered, or maybe for you to organize your finances or get funding for the next build.
To finalize, let’s recap and highlight what you get from using our described approach:
- A clear strategy with the steps to follow to start building your product
- Detailed and structured information about your product idea
- A method to validate the evolution of your product with clear goals
- A framework to get the customer and technical feedback early and often
- Tools such as the Canvas templates to bring agility and guidance
- A sense and judgment about the professional resources that you need
This useful guide will help you start building your product in simple steps and give you confidence that you are building the right product for users. Let us know how this helped you with your product idea and reach us if you need further support on your Product Builds.
Access to Free Resources
If you want to get started building your product idea with our simple framework, just access our free resources area and embrace a new approach for dynamic entrepreneurs and startups.
Click to get access to more resources used in this article.
Share this article!
