7 types of product specifications

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman. I'm CEO and founder of Peterman Design Firm, and on today's episode of Launch a Product, I'm going to talk about 7 types of product specifications. Now, depending on your product and depending on how detailed Things need to be— you may end up using all 7, you may only using a few of these, or you may create one big specification that has all of these components in it. These are the typical ones if we're going to take a product all the way through to production and we're putting everything together. I've built these kinds of specifications for many products. So let's dive in. All right, number 1, design specification. Now, design specification can be a little bit vague. Sometimes it applies in a broad sense to the entire design process or for front-end design, but typically design specifications are things like what are the features that are going to be included on the product, uh, some general dimensions, and the size of our general idea of scale. It looks at or talks about what is the user, what are other components, anything that really defines or would limit the product or define it in a sometimes a little bit more wordy way. So it's not really a hyper-technical document, But it can be a little bit more, okay, we want this to, you know, feel like this. We want it to be, you know, this type of style. So talking about style and look, feel of a product is often in a design specification. Number 2, material specification is just what it sounds like. It is specifying the exact materials. So in a single part, it'll define a single material. It'll also, you know, in an assembly, you'll be talking about the materials of different components. Also material in terms of if there's adhesives or other components to a product that you need to be aware of. So in case of soldering multiple parts together, defining what that solder is, and things that you might not think about material-wise, but you do need to define exactly what those materials are, especially in cases where the material may interact with other materials and other parts, and you wanna make sure that they're able to interact well, you can take the material specification and give that to someone who, you know, whether they're all the way to a material scientist or an engineer, whoever's gonna be best at knowing it, but they'll be able to look at it and see if there's gonna be any potential issues and interactions with materials product, and it's also something that's used to help see, you know, durability. Is it going to handle the weather that you're going to put it in, the environment that it's going to be subjected to, things like that? So material is really important specification, especially for products that have material-specific requirements. Number 3 is test specifications. Now this is just defining how A test should be run, what kind of tests, and you want to specify what the goals of the test are. So, you know, if it's, we want this product to be able to go underwater, well then, to what depth, under what conditions, and what does success look like for the test? So do you want to go be able to say 50 meters, but it actually goes to 75 because, you know, people will push the limit? Like, what, what are you gonna actually test to and defining what that success is? Number 4 is quality. So this is a little bit different than test because a quality specification is something that you use with manufacturers. It's something that you use whoever's gonna do QC for quality control for your product because you want to define what are those points. Are they checking dimensions? Are they checking Anything else specific? Are they checking water pressure tests or something that they're going to do but on a production level rather than just a one-time test? Whereas, you know, the last one we just talked about, test, is definitely for more product development and more one-time. Let's test it and make sure the design is good. This quality specifications has to do with your actual QC person, wherever that process is, making sure that your production quality is there in order to still make the same claims that you do on your product. Performance specifications. Now, performance specifications are a little bit different. They're often used for marketing and for sales and for communicating to customers what the product does and what its limits are. So things like horsepower and torque and 0 to 60 on cars, those are performance specifications. Now, some of those can be defined early on so that they could be, well, I want to build a car that has 5,000 horsepower, 5,000 torque, and goes 0 to 60 in 1 second. That's great. Well, you create a performance specification. Those are things that you want the product to perform at. And of course that varies depending on the product you're looking for. And then it also translates into performance specifications that you can tell people. So like a 50-meter water resistance, that's performance specification that could, that could fall in there. And that is something that you then can sell. Number 6 is production specifications. Production specifications are for the entire production of a product. So this can include a lot more detailed manufacturing documentation and how and when things should ship, how and when things should be made. If there's specific requirements around what is, what can be done in production, does it need to be built in a clean room? Does it need to be built underwater? Whatever those are, it's defining how the product should actually be produced. The last one that we'll go over is assembly, number 7. And assembly specifications are specific to the actual assembly, so they aren't production. You know, it's not going to define the tooling that's required the way production will. It's not going to define the manufacturing method, which production will. Assembly is simply specifying how is the product actually assembled. So assembly instructions And any special requirements around assembly are put into an assembly specification. I know there's a lot— the 7— these 7 specification types, there's a lot of information that goes into these, and without them you will have a hard time producing a product with consistent quality that meets all of your design requirements and That has the right materials, has the performance that you want, and your team's able to market and sell easily because they have the right information. So you want to make sure that you're looking at— and maybe some of these will be very short, you know, maybe they'll have a sentence or none at all. Maybe there is no testing that needs to be done for some reason, you know, or you don't have any assembly. Maybe you've made a single-part product, you don't have to worry about assembly, but— Each of these areas should be looked at, and this is something that when we go through and we put all, all the specifications together through a project, we end up touching on each of these areas in one way or another and creating some kind of specification around them. So keep that in mind and be aware of each of these areas as you go through your own project, and when you're working with someone, making sure that each of these are being defined and looked at. by whoever you're working with. Hey, thanks for watching. We really appreciate our viewers, and if you haven't subscribed yet, please do subscribe to our channel so you can get more great videos like this in your feed. And like the video. If you want to learn more about the Peterman Design Firm, please check us out on our website, petermanfirm.com. You'll find link and information in The description. And of course, we're on all social media as well, so check us out there. All right, thank you. Thank you.