Launching a Product - How Do I Reduce Product Design Costs?

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman. I'm CEO and founder of the Peterman Design Firm, and today I'm going to answer the question, how do I reduce product design costs? Now, I've talked about how to reduce product development costs in terms of the actual product. But today I'm going to talk about how to reduce the actual design costs and ensure that your project design phase doesn't bloat and eat up all your budget, putting you in a place where you can't launch your product because you don't have the budget for production. So areas that we're going to— I'm going to talk about are using good designers. Feasibility studies, scope of work, defining success, what it means for the project, and minimizing revisions. Now, this first area, using good designers. This is, of course, kind of vague, and it is intentionally. So you want to make sure that you're using designers that have— whether it's a design firm hiring an agency like mine or hiring your own individual designers and building your own team, you wanna make sure that you are working with high-quality designers and you don't wanna hire just intern level, right? You wanna have some expertise, you wanna have some people with good amount of years of experience involved in it. And this really comes down to, yes, spend more, rather than less on the design phase in terms of your actual talent that you are working with. And the reason for that is good designers with experience, especially if they have experience in your particular process or product or industry, they're able to really work more efficiently. They're able to say, oh, we've run into this before, we know how to work around this problem already, and they're able to— kind of sidestep some of the landmines that they've already walked through and learned through working with other clients. And so you want designers who have designed multiple projects, designed multiple products, have industry experience, and really you want— you actually want to have cross-industry experience because while it's good to have experience in your specific industry, There's a lot of lessons learned in other industries and other design processes that can help inform what you're doing in your industry and produce unique and better solutions than if you're just isolated in a box and you're only focused on designers that only have experience. You know, you don't want just that experience inside the industry. You want to bring in unique experiences, and by doing that, using good designers with experience, multiple industries, you'll be able to reduce your design costs because they'll be able to design more efficiently. And the benefit of that too is they'll be able to design something that's better, probably works better, and it also is going to be potentially cheaper to manufacture because they'll have already run through all those problems, and so you'll be able to actually save cost across the entire project by using the right designers and design team for your project. Now, the next thing I want to talk about is feasibility study and road mapping. These are 2 of my favorite things because doing them will save money in the design process Almost every time. Occasionally we'll do it and we're— and we've known most of those things already, and so there's not a huge amount of savings, but it is a huge risk mitigation as well for you. And if you have investors or anyone that's backing the project that isn't just you, this can go a long ways to easing their Their view of any risk and understanding the project. So understanding feasibility, knowing, looking ahead and, and seeing these are the technical feasibility issues, these are the, you know, marketing feasibility, looking at what all those analysis are and how does everything look, what are roadblocks. So knowing the roadblocks and doing, doing a feasibility study. To understand, here's, here's all the potential roadblocks. These we already know, these we can know that we can avoid by doing X, Y, and Z. These we know we're going to run into no matter what, but we can prepare for. And of course, there's always the unknown unknowns that you will not know, and there's no way of knowing until you get there. But doing a feasibility study will put out the information that that you need to say, okay, we have a really good idea. It also helps you to cost things so you know what an actual cost is gonna be. Doing that will ensure that there's no surprise or fewer surprises in the project, which means that your budget will be more stable. And then roadmapping. So when you do all that work, you do the feasibility study, it's really great raw data, but what's really great to do is to take all of that information and create an actual roadmap where you say, Here are all the steps that we need to accomplish. These are the roadblocks that we see on this roadmap and when we believe they're going to happen or where— at what point in the process they will occur because they're around these types of things. And doing that roadmap will allow you to more effectively use resources and, you know, if you work with an agency like mine, We do this because it saves us time and money through the entire project, typically by making sure that we can design more effectively for what we're trying to aim for. Next thing is have a good scope of work. So in order to do a feasibility study or even to hire any designers or design firm, this is something that I require any client that wants to work with us, we build a scope of work. So building out a scope of work just really identifies what are we trying to accomplish, what are the goals, where are we trying to go, what do you want the product to do, what are all the features, what are your constraints, what are your budget constraints, what are your customer constraints. If you have— hey, the product that you're developing and it's based on customer feedback, listing off that feedback and saying, okay, well, here's all the feedback we've gotten. This is, this is what we're trying to do, especially if there's a product improvement and you have a checklist of, well, we have these 8 things that need to be improved no matter what. These are features that need to be added or updated in order to make sure that this product matches what we're trying to launch and potentially what you've already promised. So if you've already promised something to someone else, we want to make sure that is inside the scope of work. And we do it with a questionnaire and then follow-up questions. And there's many different ways to get there, but making sure you have a good outline and a scope for what you're going to do, that will impact how much time you waste in design revisions and in going the wrong path and missing components or missing features or not having everything outlined, and you'll save a ton of time and cost in the design process by making sure your scope of work is completely ironed out. Now, the, the next part is define your success. What does success look like for your project? What does success look like for the product? Why Are we doing this and what does it mean when we're done? So what done is and what success is, it can be vague. They are different for every project. There's different nuances, certain things need to happen. So while you have a scope of work, and these could all be ideal, so some of those could be ideal, we would like to have these in here, but it's not absolutely necessary. Defining success says these 10 things must happen. That is when we consider this project to be successful, if we can check off the box on all of these. And that success metric is really important because that tells everyone involved, it gives them a really good place to aim. It says these are the things that we are going to do. This project that we're working on has these really specific goals that are musts. They're not, Maybe they're not kind of, they are, we have to accomplish these in order to be successful. That is success for us. And so having that upfront is going to make sure that design process— nobody in the design process wastes time going after things that aren't in that. And then you can add in additional things if you have time and budget to work on it, but we make sure that those things are going to be checked off at the end of the project. And it gives a really good way for us to measure, okay, well, we're going through this process and we're able to check off 5 of these, but the last 3, we are looking at how to achieve that. And that's gonna require, you know, X investment or this amount of time. And then we're able to go back. So I'm able to go back to a client and say, okay, well, you have these 8 things for success.

Mm-hmm.

These first 5, we're nailing it, but we have problems popping up, or we have a limitation here that these 3 things are, are going to be the block, that these 3 things, unless we do X, Y, and Z, we will not be able to achieve success on this project. And so you're able to then have that conversation. Well, do we need those 3 things? What do those 3 things mean? What, what is the requirement for those? Can we adjust those requirements in order to make it work? And that's really important because you don't want to delay things and you want to know as soon as possible. So knowing that success metric will allow us or anybody working on a project to say, okay, we're achieving it, or we're not, and we can identify which ones and then have that conversation. The last thing that Last thing that I want to talk about is minimizing revisions. So revisions are often a killer to most budgets, and we want to avoid constant revisions. So something that we do is we group revisions together. We try to only work as a group in grouping those revisions rather than doing one at a time. One at a time is never efficient. It also doesn't allow you to look at things holistically. And so doing that will help minimize the amount of revisions. If you're kind of grouping those together and saying, okay, well, we're going to make these 10 changes, make sure everybody's good on those, and then do the revision. And that way everything can move a little bit better forward. And revisions are going to be minimized if you do the rest of these things. If you have feasibility study, if you have a good scope of work, and also just making sure that there's really clear communication. And so if something comes up where, you know, a requirement is going to change, regulation has changed, an investor now wants something else done, you know, things like that, whatever those might be, making sure you have very clear communication with your development team. and your design team, making sure that, okay, well, we have this coming in, and the sooner the better, because if you wait too long— and obviously you may not have a choice, but if you have a choice, as soon as you know, make sure that information is provided, because there's always more cost the farther down the road you get in the design process. Where a change, especially a major change, happens, you end up having to go back and redo more, and that's going to increase your cost. So you want to make sure that your revisions, you keep in mind as much as you can what type of revision. Is this a core revision? Is this changing, you know, are we swapping out a whole new technology that is going to affect the design of the whole product because the product is literally physically designed? Around this part, right? So if you do that, then changing that part is going to change everything in the design. Or is it a cosmetic? Is it, oh, we want to change the color and that's it? Like, we just decided we're going to change color, and that's pretty easy to do. You swap out a dye or you do a different paint or whatever that is, you know. So being aware of the revision type that is being asked will also let you know, okay, well, how much is this revision going to impact design cost? Because every revision Is going to impact the amount of time that can be put into a project. And one of the things that we don't do, but is pretty common for, for a lot of firms in order to land a project, is to low bid. And then anytime there's a revision in the process, tack on an additional cost. And so you want to also be aware of that in terms of if you do engage someone, if you, if you do hire the cheapest person. Know that there's a really good chance that they're just going to RFQ, request for change, do a new change order, and they'll add a cost, and you'll end up racking up a bill a lot larger because you will have revisions through your process. And so if you're not aware of that, if you're, if you're doing a fixed bid with revision costs, then you run a big risk of being revisioned to the point where, you know, now have a different budget and you've used up all of your money and some extra. So you want to be aware of revisions. Revisions are very important and don't have— try to avoid as many as possible and make sure you don't get locked into something where you're going to end up having your costs balloon every time you ask for a color change. So Hopefully this answers the question on, on some areas of how to reduce the product design costs. And, you know, just to recap, use good designers, do a feasibility study and road mapping, have a good scope of work, define success for the project, and minimize revisions as much as you possibly can. Hey, thanks for watching.

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All right, thank you.