Alan Cohen - Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

by Alan Cohen

Copyright FILL IN YEAR Alan Cohen. All rights reserved.

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Product development is the magic that turns circuitry, software and materials into a product. The word magic here is not used by accident even for most folks who design and develop technology as a hobby or even professionally, developing new products is unknown territory, or magic as 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 products, and to supply strategies and tactics to make that stuff go smoother.

Creating an electronic product is complex, 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 budget - often by substantial amounts, 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 needed because product needs were not well known early in development. In my experience, these overuns and surprise re-development efforts 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 failures to realistically plan for productization stuff early in the process, and the 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 desireable 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 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 review Palms process later in a later chapter. 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, mechanical engineering, and so forth. 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 within this book.