In this solo podcast episode, Ian Peterman explains what a product specification is, who needs it, and which information it should contain. He outlines the broad audience for a spec—including designers, engineers, marketing, manufacturing, sales, and resellers—and stresses the importance of tailoring documentation to each stakeholder or, alternatively, consolidating into a single comprehensive document. Peterman then walks through the core components that appear in almost every spec: a clear list of product features, detailed CMF (color, material, finish) information, and dimensional data ranging from high‑level size estimates to production‑level drawings with tolerances. He also covers optional, role‑specific sections such as target users, primary and secondary use cases, and preferred manufacturing methods, explaining why each is valuable for design, testing, marketing, and production. Throughout, he differentiates between early‑stage ideation specs (focused on concept communication) and production‑level specs (focused on precise manufacturing requirements). The episode concludes with a call to action to subscribe to the channel and learn more about Peterman Design Firm.
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Hello, my name is Ian Peterman, and on today's episode I'm going to talk about what a product specification is. Now, product specifications are used by a multitude of different people in different applications, so it's a pretty broad spectrum of use, but I wanted to Kind of talk about just the high level, what are common components of it and things that you want to be aware of when putting your own product specification together, whether it's early stage and you're just trying to put some ideas together and think about an idea and really bring that idea into something a little bit more concrete in terms of what you want it to be and do, or if we're talking about production documentation and Everything needs to be really outlined perfectly in order to make sure that the product can actually be made to those specifications. So first, I'm going to start off with who needs it. I mentioned a little bit, but the people that will need this specification are yourself, the designers that are involved, engineers will look at the product specification, marketing looks at product specifications because it's part of how they're able to market and create language around the product in order to sell it. They have to be able to talk about its features and anything else that's outlined in a specification so that they can actually talk about the product in an accurate way. And of course, manufacturing, prototyping, and even other people like whoever is going to resell your product. Use a resale model for your product, they're going to need the product specifications because they're going to have to build their own marketing and put it up on their website or be able to talk about it. So also sales teams. Sales teams absolutely need to know product specifications. And each one will need a little bit different information. And so you can end up with quite a few different documents or one massive one. Which try to avoid that, but having these individual specifications for each role that needs it, really beneficial. And we'll talk about what those high-level areas are that almost every product specification has, as well as some less used and occasionally used pieces of information that may be specialized to a certain area. So first, let's talk about features. Product specifications need to have features and they need to document typically what are the features of the product, what does it do. Occasionally it goes into depth on how it does something, just depending on who you're talking to, but it absolutely should define what are the features, what does it do, what does it accomplish for the user, things like that that would allow someone to know what the product does. And this is great. Marketing is going to care because they're going to know all the features because they want to be able to sell the features that are the most impactful for your customer base, whoever is going to be purchasing it. It's also needed by production to know if they're doing a test, making sure they can test all the features that you are supposed to be able to have with the product. And designers need the features in their specification in order to design all of those in the in the beginning in order so that it can all actually be designed and you'll have those features in the product. Next, a really common component is color material and finish, so also known as CMF. And this really includes just what it says, so colors, so whether it's a material color, it's typically a material color, Or in fabrics, you know, what is the primary color of the material used? Then you have the actual material. You know, is it brass? Is it aluminum? Is it, you know, something else? Is it plastic? Is it textile? What is that material? That's where you get into really specific things like, you know, stainless steel or 316 steel. Things like that where you start really defining exactly what the material is. And then finish. Finish ranges from, it's a raw. So if you look at tables that are raw hewn and nothing's really done to them, they're not stained, things like that, then that is one look. And then it's also, are you clear coating it? Are you anodizing it if it's metal? Are you painting it? Are you just sanding it? Maybe you're just sanding it, filing edges, So there's nothing sharp, you know, things like that. So that's really important to define, you know, how— what is that final finish going to be? And so this is typically, you know, this is something typically put on drawings, is put in specifications, is really defined. And then the people that really care about this are early on, we care about it in terms of design and making sure it's going to look the right way. And then also manufacturing. Absolutely, the manufacturer is going to need to know what that's going to look like in order to make sure that that's being produced properly. Product specifications also need to have some kind of dimensions. Now, if we're talking about production-level specifications, then we're talking about drawings and detailed dimensions with tolerances. And as a whole, we can get very detailed. You have to in order to make sure that the product can be manufactured according to specifications. We also, at the very beginning, use dimensions and specifications to give a general idea of size and scale. So, you know, if somebody says we have this product and these 5 features, we want to know, well, are you trying to make that all fit in a 1-inch by 1-inch square, or is this a large product and, you know, something that a car could fit inside of? So we want to look at, you know, what is that dimension, what is that scale? And having that information will allow us to know what the scale is early on in order so that everyone involved can really think about it and have an idea. It's the size of your hand, or it's a few inches, or it's 1,000 meters, and we're now— or bigger, right? And so you'll have an idea of that all the way to those detailed drawings for manufacturing. Now, there's a few areas that I want to talk about that are sometimes included, and they're often really specific to someone that needs this information, such as sales or marketing. And so 3 things that are typically shown in a product specification that are used by specific groups is users, use case, and preferred manufacturing methods. So each of these has a little bit of a different use. Users, specifying that is oftentimes used by marketing, but it's also used with Any product testing is used in design in order to better understand the user and the product and how it will be used. You need to understand the users, so defining that in a product specification can be really helpful, especially up front, and then marketing and people like that will use it later too because they need to know who is actually going to use the product. Use case is really important in terms of understanding the features and what those features mean and what they might be used for, how the product's going to be used. Design really cares about how are you planning on using the product, understanding what the ideal use case is, and then you can extrapolate. And sometimes people will add in things like, well, this is the primary use case, but here are 3 potential additional uses that we're not designing for those specifically, but we know based on user testing and and feedback that people are gonna take this device and they're gonna use it for these other things because it's close enough or it's something that will work. And maybe it's in a pinch, maybe it will work really well, but knowing that will make sure that the product can potentially work through those additional use cases as well. And then of course, marketing wants to know what's the use case because they are going to sell it based on what it should be used for. And if you have those extra use cases that are potential maybes, marketing may be able to go, oh, that's great, we can tie that in, and we can really combine those things into making a better case for someone to purchase. It adds more value, and they're able to really show that and tell the story of that. Last is preferred manufacturing methods, and this really is in production documentation. And once you get to engineering and beyond, you know, you've already prototyped it, most likely really specifying, you know, how it's going to be made. And sometimes people will leave that. In fact, most of the times you won't always specify this because it doesn't need to be manufactured in a really specific way. But there are cases where this is absolutely needed, where you need a product to be manufactured in a specific way. Using a specific method or specific materials because of either use or you want to use only a process that has no bad off-gassing or it needs something else that typically you don't look at as much, but you do need to be aware of for your project. And so specifying the exact manufacturing method is can be really important in product specification. So hopefully this gives you an idea of what is a product specification, an idea of some of the main components that typically go into a product specification, and this will help you, you know, when you're creating an idea or when you're talking to someone to help develop a product, you'll have an idea of what kind of information is going to be good for them and, you know, what you're going to end up needing to have put together at the end when you're actually manufacturing a product or when marketing wants to get a hold of it and really do something with it to get it out there. You'll have, you'll have an idea of what kind of information you should have by the time we're done with it. 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.
