If you’re in the business of product development, here’s one thing that is important to remember: The odds are against you. A study from late last year by a Harvard Business School professor starkly demonstrated this fact. According to the professor’s research, 30,000 new products are introduced to the market every year, but only 5% of the product designs succeed.
This problem is particularly acute in the world of high-tech products, where competition is unusually fierce. Many products need to connect flawlessly to smartphones and interact with the complexity of global data and real-time communication networks, increasing the risk of not getting the product to work perfectly or failing to perform as required and frustrating the user.
Of course, no single factor separates the winners from the losers in the world of consumer technology. But one can be said to carry a bit more weight than the others: namely, product design. It doesn’t matter how innovative your product is; if its design fails to resonate with the target user and perform the required task better than alternatives, you’re doomed to failure.
The question, then, is: How can you ensure your product goes to market with the best possible design? How can you competently deal with the challenges of miniaturization, power management, software-hardware integration, complex functionality, mobile radios, etc., without missing a step? The answer is simple: collaborating with experienced professionals with multi-discipline expertise during product development, testing and manufacturing setup.
Understanding high-tech design challenges
The high-tech product environment is relentlessly competitive. Edge-seeking—staying ahead of the curve—is the defining factor of the field. Succeeding here requires a kind of double vision: You need to be deeply attuned to your own product while staying vigilant about what your competitors are up to. New features mean new unknowns, new risks and win-lose reactions based on the way you decide to implement the product design.
Preventing product failure includes getting manufacturing agreement on part selection and assembly methods to minimize risks to ensure product performance and reliability. (Source: Unsplash)
New smart-home protocols like Matter, designed to simplify and standardize the smart-home experience for consumers, are just one new addition to the long list of things that product developers have to worry about—a list that also includes miniaturization of devices, functional wireless battery charging, seamless integration of software and hardware components and much more. If product development teams give less than their all to carefully integrate all of these things, the odds of eventual product failure increase significantly.
Preventing that failure, of course, means prototyping, testing and getting manufacturing agreement on part selection and assembly methods to minimize risks to ensure product performance and reliability long before production launch is critical. Getting that done is no easy task—it takes multiple kinds of experts working closely together that many companies don’t necessarily have on staff. For that reason, collaboration with experienced design firms who do have that kind of expertise is critical.
Partnering with end-to-end product design experts
The best product idea in the world means nothing without the experience and knowledge required to actualize it. And experience is what product design firms with integrated supply strategy teams can offer in abundance, particularly for startups.
Product design firms employ skilled people who have been in the industry for years, who know the best practices like the backs of their hands and who have accumulated the relevant technical knowledge over years or even decades of trial and error. Startups, of course, bring their own skills to the table—vision, entrepreneurial grit—but the experienced professionals at product design firms can round out the package and ensure a successful product launch.
These design professionals are people who, day after day, turn their energies toward solving intricate technical problems, where they are faced with one of the thousand complex challenges that goes into even the simplest high-tech product. They can draw on a vast well of experience and quickly determine the best solution and avoid the high-risk and low-end user-value solutions that many inexperienced teams choose for the wrong reasons.
Of course, not every product design firm is built equally, nor is every product design firm equipped to take on every kind of project. Before choosing a product design firm, startups should hold a number of meetings, learn the lay of the land and make an educated decision about who to partner with based on the product’s particular technical requirements and the related experience of the development team.
Calibre Biometrics: From the lab to the market
Let’s turn to the story of Calibre Biometrics as an example of how a product design firm helped actualize the vision of a startup.
Calibre Biometrics is best-known for taking the breath biometric technology only available in medical testing laboratories and turning it into a wearable consumer device, claimed as the world’s first of its kind. This innovation has made a tangible impact on the lives of countless consumers, granting them instant access to their crucial health biometric data.
Calibre Biometrics had the vision and marketing expertise to make this product a success. But it was collaborating with a product design firm that helped to put them over the finish line. The design firm had extensive experience with custom electronics, embedded firmware, mechanical engineering, industrial design and supply strategy and was able to effectively de-risk the process. Through expert prototyping, testing, manufacturer pilot builds and user trials, the design firm was able to ensure that when the product reached the market, it would be a successful launch.
Technology is moving fast, and the high-tech product market is about as unforgiving as they come. And with the window for each new product to make an actual dent in the market shrinking, it’s going to become even more difficult for entrepreneurs to succeed. If you want to develop and manufacture industry-leading devices at scale—devices that integrate the most innovative battery management, sensor technology and wireless experience—tapping into the expertise of professional, experienced product design firms is the only way to go when you lack the technical expertise in-house.
About the author
A passionate product designer and business executive, Design 1st CEO and founder Kevin Bailey helps guide CEOs, startups and established companies through the maze of hardware product development. Spending over 35 years in the detailed design of hardware products, Kevin is now an expert at assessing risk and opportunity when making the hundreds of decisions required to move from a vision to a physical product that customers find useful and businesses can manufacture.
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