Product Development

Product development is for the buyer who has decided to enter or extend a category and needs the whole chain, not a quotation for a part. The work starts one step earlier than engineering: with the question of what the product has to be better at, and what that is worth on the shelf.

The category question first

Nine device families and 26 models in production is a useful position from which to answer it. We can say what a comparable device costs to build, where the price floor actually sits, and which features are expensive to add but invisible to the user.

That analysis sometimes ends the project. It is cheaper to end it at the specification gate than at the tool.

One schedule, one owner

Design, electronics, tooling, certification and production are usually separate suppliers, which is why a slip in one becomes an argument between three. Under one programme, the same team owns the schedule and the change has one owner — the cost of a change is visible immediately rather than discovered at the container.

The four gates

Feasibility, design freeze, T1 approval and production release. Each gate produces a document and a decision, and a project that has passed a gate without one is a project that will revisit that decision later, at a higher price.