Prototype to Product Launch: 4 Tips for Risk-Based Hardware Development

The lightning bolt of inspiration strikes. You reach for the nearest cocktail napkin. What will you jot down? Big idea or budget line items for a 10,000-prototype beta launch? Of course, most developers want to capture that idea before it dances away. 

But if you want a successful launch, you can’t ignore the details in between that first working prototype and a scalable product.

That’s why our team of engineers has compiled four guidelines for using risk-based product development to successfully launch your hardware products.

The Gap Between Prototype and Product Launch

For many developers, it’s easy to lose sight of the nitty gritty but necessary details between creating a prototype and ultimately launching your product. This couldn’t be more true for risk-based hardware products, when in addition to weighing cost and quantity, you’re also considering risks associated with using your product.

Between creating a prototype and launching your product, there’s a pretty sizable gap. You might think when you get your prototype that you just need to do a little tweaking for manufacturing optimization. In actuality, there’s still a lot more work to do—learning your market, testing product reliability, and getting necessary certifications.

In the early stages of development, you’ll accrue technical debt making compromises that initially save you time and resources but can lead to inefficiencies down the line. It can make sense early on to prioritize speed of design or pay more for components to test that your idea works, but that comes with the compromise of doing cost optimizations and reliability improvements later. In order to balance long-term performance and reliability with scalable cost, you’ll need to address this technical debt between the prototype and product launch phases.


Treetown Tech’s 4 Guidelines for Launching Risk-Based Hardware Products

So, how do you get from prototype to product launch? Here are our engineers’ top four guidelines to successfully navigate the nebulous space between them.

1. Identify your one big idea.

What is the one thing you’re offering that no one else is? Refer back to your cocktail napkin here. What got you thinking about this product in the first place? Why do people need it (and who are they)? If you’re offering something people can get elsewhere, then narrow your focus. What’s the one feature that’s worth it for people to be in your market?

Remember, there will be a lot of next steps to learning your market, understanding your product reliability, and figuring out necessary certifications for your unique product in the specific market you’re targeting. Stay realistic about cost vs. quantity vs. risk.

2. Pinpoint your friendliest market.

Who are your ridiculously passionate early adopters? The ones who submitted their email to your website the moment they heard you were working on it. Those are the people you want to target—the ones who have been screaming for exactly what you’re offering but it just hasn’t been out there yet. They’ll be eager to be part of your alpha test group and put up with bugs and defects while you smooth things out.

Those folks are your friendliest beachhead market who will ultimately help you move your technology forward.

3. Launch with laser focus.

What are the most important things to your customers and investors? Launch with great intentionality and focus to support those interests. How? One way is to build fewer prototypes in each iteration, so you can learn and improve more each time—while being mindful to ensure your product strategy mitigates the right risk and technical debt at the right time. By getting a meaningful product into fewer hands, you’ll benefit by understanding both the product and the market better.

This is particularly important for risk-based hardware products that may have mechanical and electrical components, a variety of manufacturing methods, software, and unique inventions. By launching a small number of higher-cost prototypes in a friendly test environment, you’ll get invaluable feedback on how to improve your product before you send thousands of final products to the manufacturer.

Keep in mind, ‘focused’ and ‘small’ doesn’t mean ‘slow.’ You absolutely don’t need to slow your process down in order to be more targeted. Be intentional, not plodding.

4. Mitigate risk at the right time.

When do I consider which risks? By now, you might be noticing a theme here—it’s all about staying focused. You’re going to be weighing risk throughout development. So, how do you know what risks take precedent when?

Rather than going after the simplest issues at the front end (the things we know we can do), we typically say let’s go after the hardest problem first. Answer the question of technical feasibility before you invest more time and money into the product. Once you know you can achieve what you’re after, then you can start to tackle the smaller things that follow.

Constantly evaluate the liability of each risk to determine if it makes sense to delay mitigating that risk in order to move fast. Then control this liability by controlling exposure, which means optimizing our production quantity and quality at each iteration and utilizing a friendly market to gather user and reliability data. As you gather more data in future iterations, focus on testing and user feedback (as well as intimate knowledge of your business model) to determine the right time to return to mitigating those delayed risks.

Ready to develop your next hardware product?

Want to learn more about getting your risk-based hardware project from prototype to product launch? Reach out to our expert team of engineers today and we’ll walk you through the process.

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