In this solo podcast episode Ian Peterman walks listeners through a generic five‑stage product development process, using a microphone as a running example. He begins by acknowledging the many existing frameworks and then presents his high‑level view: (1) Research – market, design, usability, and ergonomics research to understand the problem space; (2) Ideation – generating concepts based on the research, defining user needs, brand language, and product specifications; (3) Engineering/Development – translating the chosen concept into technical specifications, fitting components, and ensuring feasibility; (4) Prototyping – building functional prototypes, gathering user feedback, iterating on design and engineering issues; (5) Manufacturing – finalizing design‑for‑manufacturing, optimizing cost, durability, and production volume, and moving to full‑scale production. Throughout he stresses the importance of each bucket, the iterative feedback loop between stages, and the role of specialized design‑research professionals. He concludes by promising a deeper dive into his personal process in a future video and includes a call‑to‑action for viewers to subscribe and learn more about the Peterman Design Firm.
Chapters
Hey everyone, I'm Ian Peterman, and today I'm going to talk about stages of product development. And there's many different ways to look at product development. There's, you know, 5-stage version, there's 11-stage, there's 3 steps, you know, there's, there's a broad range of it. And today I'm just gonna go over the generic 5-stage, here's the overarching buckets that need to be looked at and are a part of developing a product from the I have an idea stage to we're producing it. And I have my own development process that elaborates on this, but I wanna introduce this to you because it's, gonna give you an easy understanding on just the really high-level touchpoints of what are the stages of product development. So first, let's talk about research. Step 1, have an idea. There's gonna be some level of research involved in product development, so market research, design research, looking at usability, ergonomics and many other factors and really researching what is around the product, what's already out on the market, and having a good understanding of the project as a whole before anything gets started. And there's a lot that can be done in this stage. There's an entire category of designers that specifically work in design research. That's All they do— they actually don't do any of what you would think of as design work. They do the research. They are able to put together everything that you need in order to allow really good and well-thought-out design to happen by doing all this research. Next stage, stage 2, ideation. So ideation is where you take that research, you understand the product, you understand the users, And all that research has gone in and you start creating ideas around a central theme. So the core idea might be, I want a microphone. That's great. And all the research is, how is a microphone designed? What are the microphones out there? How do users use microphones? What are features that they like? What does the current market look like? What does the pricing look like? Things like that. All the design research has already happened. Now the ideation is, Okay, well, how do we make a microphone that really fits the market for this company? Who who are the users that we're going after? How do we make a microphone that's going to really work with for this group of customers? How are we going to make something that has all the features they're looking for and creating ideas and and a lot of the design language is. Formed here in terms of, well, this is the brand, this is how the look and feel should be, and really ideating and creating a bunch of ideas on how can we create a solution for this problem, create a product that does what it needs to do and meets all the requirements that have been put together in a product specification. In order to meet those requirements, what is that? What are some ideas that fit with that? Next, once ideation is kind of done and we have a good idea, we have concepts that have been sketched out and thought out and are put together enough that we can say yes or no to them, then we start going through a process of engineering. Call it engineering or development, where the technical side is now brought in. OK, we know what the color we want it to have. We know the shape we want it. We know some material ideas of what it should be, but now it's time to get into the nitty-gritty of, okay, well, how do we put everything in this? How do we fit the electronics in there? You know, if we're using this microphone example, what are the microphones? How do we specify the exact microphone? What is the engineering required to make all the electronics work? How do we make all of that thing, all of it come together into one product that's going to still follow your product specifications. It's going to stay within the design language and constraints that ideation has been able to bring together, and it's going to work with the users in the market that everybody has researched and put together. And engineering is pulling it all together. And this can be done by an engineer. It can be done by a various group of people depending on what this looks like, but you're really putting the nuts and bolts together for an actual product that's really well-defined and is something that's going to be able to work. The next place is prototyping. So step 4, prototype. And the previous stages, you've definitely been doing prototyping. There's prototyping throughout all of it. But at this level, we're talking about I have a fully functional prototype. I'm able to get feedback from users. I'm able to get market testing. I'm able to photograph it and share it and get the really all the feedback possible to know, is this a good product? Do people love it? Is there, what is the reaction people have? Do people use it in the way we think people will use it? Does it work? Does, does everything come together in a way that we can all agree, yeah, this product is working really well, or if not, what are those issues? What are the things that we should be changing? And this is, you know, it involves engineering, it involves design, it involves high-level prototyping, and it's all put together in order to create this circle and cycle of, okay, well, we have it here, this works, this doesn't work, what do we need to adjust? And this becomes where a lot of churn can happen in terms of, okay, well, these ideas, they looked really good, they were great, engineering said we could do it, you know, the 3D model said that it was totally possible, but when it came to actually making it, these are some issues that popped up, or this is customer feedback, they, they want it different. And while, you know, customers may have been okay with a previous prototype that wasn't all the way there, there, maybe they imagined some of that prototype in their head a little bit different than what it ends up being in this stage. And so this is a very important stage in terms of getting that feedback. The last stage is manufacturing, and there's a lot that goes into manufacturing, but basically once you have a good solid prototype that everyone agrees is what it should be, it has all the features You're getting good feedback from users. There's no issues in making it that come up readily. Then you go to the manufacturing stage, and this is where, you know, manufacturers may have been involved in the last stage, but this is where you solidify that and you have manufacturers who are going to actually end up making your product. They start— they're involved. You do any final adjustments for doing things like design for manufacturing, making sure the product can actually be manufactured and optimizing it so that your product is as easily manufacturable as possible to make it cheaper, make it more durable, whatever those things are that you want to make sure that are possible, and make sure that it's something that you can produce in the number that you need to be able to produce it in. And then you can begin manufacturing. So these stages, they're the high level of, you know, what goes into product development. There are buckets to look at. You know, we have research, ideation, engineering, prototyping, manufacturing. These all come together as part of the process. And a later video, video, I'm going to go over my own process. And, you know, this is, this is the process that I was taught as a kid in school and learned. And it's the general follow these steps. This is, this is what you'll You won't go wrong by following these steps. You'll end up with a product, but I'll expand a little bit more in a later video on just how to make this process even better. So hopefully this gives you a good idea of basic stages of product development. 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.
