Who Should Be Involved in the Product Development Process?

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman, and today on this episode we're going to answer the question, who should be involved in the product development process? Now, this is a question I get a lot from inventors and, and early startups who haven't done this before that just aren't sure who all really needs to be involved in the process to make that their project is successful. And so there's 6 areas that are really important to have some expertise in, in order to make sure your product development process is a success, you know, resulting in your product launching. So first is legal, then we have business, design, engineering, prototype, and actual manufacturing. So those 6 areas are all segments of product development process that really have their own specialty. And you want to make sure you have some expertise in those areas in order to be as successful as possible. Now, of course, you don't have to be an expert in all of those yourself. You can hire all of it out. You could do nothing other than provide the initial idea. Or of course you can, you can always choose to learn as, as much as you want and become as expert as you need to in each of those areas. So First, let's start off with legal. So there's a couple legal portions to product development process. The first being patents. Patenting and ensuring you aren't infringing on patents is very important to having a successful product launch because if you don't and you end up developing something that is infringing, you're— you can end up losing all of your profit or You know, even worse, being shut down completely and end up being out of business and nowhere you wanted to be. So looking at the legal side of that is really important. There's also, of course, trademarks, copyrights, and other things that might be associated with product development. There's also the business legal side, and this will transition a little bit into number 2, but the business legal side is also really important. Understanding how your business is set up, making sure that it's set up properly is, of course, applies mostly to startups, but established companies launch separate business entities in order to launch a new product. And so setting up the legal structure properly for the product in order to go to market, or licensing agreements, things like that that need to be put in place because maybe you're licensing a technology from someone else, patent IP, something else, and that license agreement you don't want it to have attached to your primary business. And so you want to just, you know, talk to legal counsel, make things are scheduled, kind of put together the best way there. For number 2, it's business. So we have a lot of things that go into the business, right? You have all the accounting and we have the legal side of business, and you also have things like marketing. And you also want to look at— and this is something that I do inside of our feasibility studies— is the corporate structure and the team behind it. So yeah, you're launching a new product, but can the business handle that product launch? Do you have the support staff in place? Do you have a team that you can put together to manage it? Do you have management? Do you have— what are all the assets that you have together in your business, and do they have the bandwidth to accommodate the launch of this product and the product development process. So I also consider part of this business section financial. So you want to look at, you know, if you're not an expert in all the business areas, you want to make sure you bring in expertise for the business side of making sure your business survives a product launch. You want to make sure that, yeah, you launch really successfully, great. You want to make sure the company is thriving and it's not an excruciatingly painful process. To launch. And so there's a lot of expertise around business that you can bring in and be able to help you make sure the business side of your product development process is handled well. And of course, financial— having an accountant or, you know, CPA or anyone else that's involved in the financial side of things— is also can be really beneficial. in making sure that you're spending money wisely and everything's being done properly and to whatever tax codes that will apply to you. The third area that I want to talk about is design. So if you're an inventor, you know, you've already come up with some design. You may have already prototyped it. It could be ready to review. If you're a big company, you may have already done this internally yourself, but it's always valuable to make sure you have some expertise design input Just because bringing in an outside design thinking and process and experience and person or team will likely look at things in a little bit different way and may be able to point out things that you may have missed or may not have been aware of and really be able to infuse additional creativity into the design process. Now, you can, of course, if you designed it all and you're secure on the design, you know that it'll be good, it'll work. Marketing, it's going to be good for it. This is definitely the area that sometimes can be kind of completed by yourself, especially the inventor design-it-yourself type people. But again, it would— it is always beneficial to bring in some outside design experience. The next area that I want to talk about is engineering. So Even if you've designed it and it looks really great and you're really happy with it, engineering it and designing it for manufacturing and looking at, you know, what are the materials going to do, what are— do we need any specialty information or something that has to do with structural safety, you want to make sure that you have someone review it. Now, Not all products are going to need engineering. If you aren't sure, it's worth talking to a design firm or an engineering firm that has engineering staff or hiring an independent engineer just to come in and look at it and say, yeah, everything looks good. There's no reason— we don't need to do any specific type of analysis that requires engineering physics in order to do. We don't need anything like that. And just to make sure that you're not missing anything. Because the last thing you want to do is just skip over the engineering step and say, oh, we don't need that, and find out later that you do, because that's going to result in going back to design, and you're going to now be stepping through a lot of these steps again. Engineering is also— it's really important in order to do the next step, which is kind of the prototyping. So now I want to talk about prototyping. Prototyping is something that, you know, you can do your quick little prototypes and you're gonna have your design prototypes, and there's, there's a lot of prototyping that happens beforehand, but here I'm talking about your final working prototype. So this is where you have a fully functional— it contains all the features. If it has software, software has been coded for it. It has every piece of hardware, every piece of software, any additional peripheral pieces that need to be there to support it, you've developed whatever you need to, and it is as close to production as possible, you want to bring in— if you have a shop and you know how to do all this, great. Do it yourself. Prototype, make the final prototype. Otherwise, if it's outside of your scope, there's a lot of different types of prototyping. That is sometimes put together to make your prototype. So there's electronics prototypes that can be developed in different ways that aren't— don't require full production. So there's many different ways to prototype, and you want to make sure that you have the right expertise, because if you build the prototype wrong and you think that— but you think that you've done it correctly and it works but not great, then that prototype is what you're going to end up using to model off of for production is going to be what you validate in tests potentially. So your prototype needs to be done right and it needs to be done to the specs that you've defined for the product. And so having expertise, whether it's, you know, 3D printing or milling or, you know, any kind of manufacturing process that's used in prototyping, you probably aren't going to be an expert at all of those. So bring in the experts that you need, and through your conversations with designers and engineers, you're gonna have— you're gonna know, or they're gonna tell you, hey, we're gonna need this— these different types of prototypers and prototyping skills and tools in order to create it. And that's what we're gonna put together. And, you know, if you're working with a whole firm, obviously they'll kind of— they'll just manage the whole process and they'll just bring in whatever resources are needed. But if you're looking at just trying to figure out who all you need to have involved and make sure that whoever, whatever firm you're talking to knows what they're talking about. You want to make sure that they're going to mention prototype experts or prototype experienced people that are involved for this phase. The last section that I want to talk about is manufacturing. So prototyping, there is a lot of shared experience. But a lot of times prototype companies don't do production. They'll do maybe limited run. So they'll produce up to X number of units a year or X number of units period. They just, that's their market. They work in prototyping. Those experts are really good at making prototypes. And then you have the manufacturing and engineering interfaces with both of these. So does design, but Manufacturing is a whole different way of thinking because you're not thinking about how to make 1 or 5. You're thinking about how to make hundreds, thousands, millions of parts a year as efficiently as possible with minimal waste. And so if you aren't experienced in manufacturing, you absolutely want to have an expert in manufacturing. And sometimes the manufacturer themselves will bring that expertise in Sometimes you'll need to bring in additional expertise, either in an engineer or product developer or designer who understands a little more specific about your part, your product, in order to ensure that through the design for manufacturing process, it doesn't lose what your initial intent is and you're able to get the right manufacturing. That requires a 2-way conversation between design and engineering and manufacturing. Side in order to ensure that yes, your product is designed, it's great, it still works, and it's able to be mass-produced. And so that's actually one of the most important pieces because once you get to that point, if you skip that and you do really, really well and you sell 100,000 units but your product isn't optimized for it, you can end up running a huge risk of not being able to deliver the product that you said you would. So we've gone over 6 areas that are really important that you want to, want to have someone involved in the product development process with experience and expertise in. They're legal, business, design, engineering, prototype, and manufacturing. And having expertise in all of these areas will ensure that your product development process, your product launch has the highest chance of success in launching a product that'll actually make it to market and make your customers happy. 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 wanna 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.