Cohen - Prototype to product a practical guide for getting to market

by Alan Cohen

Copyright 2015 Alan Cohen. All rights reserved.

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[LSI]

Product development is the magic that turns circuitry, software, and materials into a product. The word magic here is not used by accident; for most folks who design and develop technology as a hobby or even professionally, creating new products is unknown territoryor magicas far as they are concerned.

This books goal is to help the reader to gain a better understanding of the stuff that happens along the way when great ideas metamorphose into great productsin particular, intelligent products with embedded electronics and softwareand to supply strategies and tactics to make that stuff go more smoothly.

Creating an intelligent product is complex. Its much more than developing some circuits and software, plopping em into a case, and hanging out a for sale sign. Numerous activities must be performed to turn components and cool prototypes into a desirable, usable, reliable, manufacturable, and salable product.

In part because of the complexity, new product development is a risky undertaking. According to Harvard Business School Professor Clay Christensen, 95% of new products fail. A number of factors play into this high rate, but Ive experienced firsthand that many or most new product failures stem from failures in the product development process.

For example, notoriously, most product development efforts end up being late and over budgetoften by substantial amounts of 25% or more. Even a 100% overrun is not unusual. Sometimes overruns are caused by simply not estimating effort correctly. They often also come from surprise re-development efforts, which become necessary because product needs were not well known early in development. In my experience, these overruns and surprise re-development efforts often stem from flaws in the productization process, not from the fundamental technology involved.

Budget and timeline surprises in the product development process are usually quite avoidable. They normally come from a lack of knowledge about the process, particularly the failure to realistically plan for productization stuff early in the process, and a lack of complete and clear requirements.

But proper product development is about more than avoiding overruns; it can also play a key role in refining a great concept into a desirable product. For example, when the Palm Pilot was released in 1996, most folks in the technology biz knew that the concept of a computer-in-your-pocket was a dog. A slew of pocketable computers had come and gone, including Apples Newton, and all had bombed. Couldnt be done.

The Palm Pilot proved the technology biz wrong: it was a raging success. Much of this success came from a smart product development process where the right kinds of testing were done at the right stage of the process to ensure that the technology Palm developed solved real problems and fit into real lives (well touch on the Palms process a bit more in ). While Palm failed to stay ahead of its competition, its paradigm for pocket computing lives on in todays smart phones, which look much more like a Palm Pilot than, say, an Apple Newton.

Many books do a great job of covering parts of product development, such as electronic design, software development, industrial design, usability, and mechanical engineering. There are a handful of books that cover product development at a business level, reviewing topics ranging from market research, to financial forecasting, to team dynamics. But very little has been written that covers, holistically, the nuts and bolts of efficiently moving from good ideas to manufactured product, and thats what I hope to do with this book.