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Product Development Perspective: Aligning with Your Client on a Quality Design

By: Charles (Ed) Becze, Ph.D.

This article is part of an ongoing series of white papers. In this pair of papers Ed talks about design quality and the importance of choosing a great design and development firm with whom to partner as you bring your product from concept to creation. What should you as an inventor, be looking for in this critical relationship?

Every client's aim is a quality product: a known truth, an easy goal, but a challenge to attain. If a client is looking to outsource development services, delivering a quality product is one of their top concerns. And as it should, this drives clients to evaluate their potential design partners' capabilities. How do you, a client, make the right choice? Select the right partner? How do you filter the noise, know whom to trust? These questions have no easy answer. For one, the design and development partners will also have questions of their own. They may question your expectations and preparedness, and they will need to assess whether both are aligned and realistic. Also, as design professionals, they will focus on essential quality aspects that extend far beyond the product. This outlook will govern their approach to provide a targeted design process. It really will come down to demonstrable experience, understanding of the issues, and comfort and belief in each other. And by your design and development firm's "experience," I mean going beyond current industry trends because "experience" actually drives every phase of a product's execution. You want to hear from a potential partner that their experience makes them confident.

Cheaper Is Never Lower Cost

A professional and highly experienced design and development firm that specializes in launching products will cost you money. Those who have witnessed both sides of the proverbial coin can attest to this. Sticker shock is always an issue, but I can assure you that even though the perceived rates seem high, the experience and skill in execution will save you two to three times what you would typically spend at a lower-value boutique shop. I cannot overstate that experience drives precision in execution – from every aspect.

If you aim to launch a product and are serious about the end result, choose a partner with demonstrable experience.

They will guide you along in ways you can't even begin to imagine – it's not your profession, it's theirs.

The following provides insight into the importance of leveraging your partner's experience and rationalizing why you should value a competent approach.

How Does a Competent Development Partner Ensure Product Quality?

Before I can answer this question, I first need to explain that the past few decades have witnessed a dramatic increase in leveraging offshore manufacturing and, as of late, also development. Understandably, this shift in operations overseas has driven some significant changes in North America's general manufacturing experience level.

Local, knowledgeable development partners experienced and skilled in introducing products into manufacture are becoming a rare commodity. Ideally, designers and developers should all have spawned from the pre-offshoring era and entered the new paradigm leveraging their previous knowledge. Those who have lived the old-school methods and have learned our craft through years of direct exposure happily bring this hard-earned knowledge to modern processes. This experience provides us with unique expertise and drives our product development process, applying it to the entire development lifecycle. All quality designs start at the beginning of the process. Quality is not an afterthought.

The fact is, those experienced in development know and understand that design quality starts and ends with the requirements. When we engage with any customer, one of the first questions we ask centers around product expectations. We try to understand what the client is trying to deliver and whether his vision aligns with market demands. An experienced partner knows that the key differentiator of launching scores of mass-produced products allows an understanding of both technology and (more importantly) implementation.

Experience allows one to ask critical questions. Being part of a professional design firm and with decades of experience behind us, we insist on guiding our customers to define their products with both intent and product quality in mind. We do this by addressing two significant aspects of quality, leveraging our direct experience. I can best illustrate our approach by splitting the discussion into two streams, each of substantial value to our customers, albeit rarely understood.

Stream 1 – Meeting the Customer Vision (or Design Intent Quality)

As a potential client, you should start your engagement by focusing on your vision. More often than not, clients arrive with a minimal set of requirements that loosely describe the product and its function. They do not understand that their definition is incomplete and that to develop and deliver a product, they will need a Product Requirements Document (PRD).

A PRD centers on performance, function, and durability. Inevitably, there are gaps in an innovator's vision for their product, and hopefully, they are open dialogue to close these gaps. Less experienced development partners will miss these gaps entirely and, therefore, will deliver something that does not meet your intent or vision. The more experience development partners will understand your concept and will be able to see the road and obstacles that may lie ahead. You may loosely say you want a screwdriver, and if one delivers a hammer, it does not matter how good it is; it does not meet the design intent. Enter your partner's experience: they will know what you want from your idea and deliver on it.

Your design and development partner must dig deep by asking the right clarifying questions to converge on a high-quality solution that meets your vision. If they do not ask these comprehensive questions, look for another partner. Having a thoughtful two-way discussion defines your objective. The aim is to have a clear metric for success from a design and development perspective.

Once clarified and clearly understood what to focus development on, the quality metric becomes easy, and then you can gauge if your partner has delivered on your requirements. This new aim is a tangible and measurable metric that provides a measure for customer satisfaction. More importantly, it provides a foundation for DESIGN INTENT QUALITY – the correlation of the physical product intent with the product definition aligned with the market goal. Without exception, it is my experience that customers who have gone through this process recognize the value of knowledge and experience.

Stream 2 – Executing on the Customer's Vision (or Product Quality):

Let's assume that you have successfully defined the product and have understood the requirements, and all aspects align with your marketing needs. The next task is to execute development and systematically refine the product to meet a predefined product quality target. Usually, this is done through a tried-andtrue process, whereby one understands the reliability risks, manufacturing risks, and use-case risks and integrates the mitigation process into development.

There is a subtle nuance here that many clients do not understand. For system-level implementations, all hardware and software development paths must align to converge on a functioning and testable platform as early as possible in the process. This allows for extensive testing of your designs and is not to burn up your cash, but quite the opposite: these processes protect your investments. Avoid the tendency to challenge this effort, and you will soon realize the benefits while embracing the process.

By this point in the process, you should be confident that the way forward is clear and that your design has fidelity. You are satisfied that your CAPEX expenditures (tooling, etc.) are protected. Now, you can confidently continue with the development process maturing the product into production.

Don't Forget Manufacturing and Test

You can have the most experienced team or development partner on the planet to deliver the most thoughtful paper design. Still, it is your manufacturer who will ultimately bring your product into reality. Thus, your selection of a manufacturer must be as thoughtful and calculated as your design partner selection. Their intrinsic capability must align with your product.

Over the years, we have worked with scores of manufacturers, from small to large, both onshore and offshore. We can quickly assess if they have the skills to deliver on the product intent – this is also a characteristic you should be confident your development partner brings to the table. When possible, give your development partner the latitude to suggest manufacturers from their trusted network targeted directly at their product class. This has many benefits, but most importantly, you are assured that the capability you are looking for from a product perspective is there.

For instance, if you have a very high-end connected device with stringent requirements on RF connectivity packaged in a small injection molded housing, you wouldn't want an overseas LED manufacturer specializing in sheet metal housings and simple integration to assemble your product. They wouldn't even know where to begin to support you, especially with the necessary manufacturing test infrastructure you require to validate your product.

There is a subtle distinction here that needs clarification. A quality product is not only designed with quality in mind but it is also manufactured with great care and considerable validation. There is a definite tendency to want to place less emphasis on product validation and testing during development because time-to-market and budgets are the more immediate concern. Resist demanding shorter or cheaper development cycles at the expense of testing and validation. The fact is that the development process requires its due time. I have seen many companies severely underestimate the cost and effort associated with validation and quality testing. One thing I can definitively state; either you will spend the effort on validation during development, or you will spend it on aftermarket support and customer service. It's your call.

Change the Current Paradigm – Shoot for the Highest Quality

Our expectations as customers and end-users of technology and, to a greater extent, the products we buy are impacted by trends established in the development industry decades ago. In the not-so-distant past and for those of us who can remember, for the items we possessed – be it clothing or gadgets – the mantra was "quality." The cost was a significant driving factor that limited what we owned, and this set certain expectations: items had to last because we could not afford to cycle them out and replace them with new ones. Product companies understood this. Delivering to this expectation took years of refinement of the development process – a process governed by rigidity and learning. This is what spawned quality systems like TQM and Six-Sigma to control the entire lifecycle.

Today, however, our product expectations have changed. The companies that reduced costs in creative ways, such as offshoring manufacturing or simply rebranding offshore designed products, have driven a new consumer paradigm. This has inadvertently pushed us as consumers into a new way of thinking quality is of lesser importance because we "just replace it and get another one." A way of thinking that is fundamentally bad for all business. Products that fail to meet quality expectations and drive sales due to replacement are poor products. Sales volumes should always be driven by innovation and functional improvements or enhancements.

Don't Put Lipstick on the Pig

For many product companies, the design focus has shifted more to quick-turn new-and-improved products with expanded functionality (or, as I call it, "glitter") to attract market share. However, very often, less consideration is given to improving the quality of existing products, which does not imply that the intent is absent. Still, the focus is in a different value stream. The tendency is to add functionality before addressing known deficiencies, which often propagates those design deficiencies throughout subsequent revisions of products. An open dialogue and candid feedback with your design partner may rectify these deficiencies.

Great design partners don't need you to highlight deficiencies because– they will see it right from the design files you submit. You may be surprised; any competent development partner can improve product quality and integrate new technologies concurrently to revise products quite quickly for marginal costs.

Summary

Design quality starts with a complete and clear understanding of what you want to deliver and why. Document it! If you can't articulate your idea, your partner will seldom deliver what you want without significant churn. In addition to supporting your design and development partner, focus on your manufacturing solution. It must align with your product and business strategy. Finally, please do not forget to test, test and retest. Insist on it – and you won't contribute to the landfills.

About the Author

Charles (Ed) Becze, Ph.D., is a co-founder of Pegmatis, Inc. Over his career, he has worked with Pratt & Whitney, Ford, and an electronics Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). Pegmatis Inc is home to a team of highly experienced software, hardware, and manufacturing professionals who are proud to have produced some award-winning products, many of which you may have in your own homes. Connect with Ed on LinkedIn or contact him for more information at Pegmatis.com.

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Our story began as an elite design center for a Fortune 500 company, where we collaborated with top-tier customers to launch numerous high-volume products into the market. In 2016, Pegmatis emerged as an independent entity, carrying forward the same Dream Team and adding an elite software group to provide truly comprehensive product development services. With Pegmatis, you're not just hiring experts; you're partnering with a proven team dedicated to your success.

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