Some customers come to us with a product concept to develop and they severely under-estimate the time it will take. They often believe that they will get ‘perfect’ look- and work-like prototypes within 1 or 2 months. Unfortunately, for a medium-complexity electro-mechanical product, there is some road to travel before you get to that point.
Designing such a product is not a 1-shot-and-done process. It involves different ‘tracks’. At a minimum, companies need to distinguish between the “look & feel” track and the “functionality” track.
First, a high-level view of the various phases of the project
You have already nailed your product concept and documented initial product requirements, and you may have started some of the design work. You are still in the early stages of the NPI process (that you can see on the graphic below):
On the way to look- and work-like prototypes, you need to plan for various plan-design-prototype-test iterations.
And you need to think of two different tracks that have different purposes:
- Defining and validating the product look & feel
- Defining and validating product functionality
Track 1. Working on the product ‘look and feel’
For consumer products, this work usually starts very early, with deep involvement of industrial designer(s). On the opposite end of the spectrum, for an industrial IoT product, it may just be an afterthought.
The “models” or “prototypes” are not necessarily physical in the first instances. They may be sketched concepts, digital mock-ups, and then progress into physical prototypes made to look like the desired product and show its aesthetic features.
Note: We wrote before about the issues and limitations that prototyping methods present when compared to production methods in this article. So, in case the enclosure necessitates tooling, the “final” look & feel prototypes can only be prepared and approved once that tooling is ready.
Track 2. Working on the product ‘functionality’
Planning for the functional prototypes also starts very early in the project. It usually starts with picking the right architecture, deciding on the chipset and the key components, and making a quick semi-functional “proof of concept” prototype.
When the main challenge with a new product is the way it will work, and resources are limited, this track has to come first – see this case study for example.
It can be a long road, involving electronics and software disciplines as well as highly specialized engineering. For a complex product, planning for a dozen prototype iterations is often realistic. For a complex product that pushes the boundaries of what is possible, it may be many dozens.
Hardware and software integration itself might lead to many headaches and design adjustments. Early work-like prototypes are used for further market research and pre-sale activities, and the feedback can throw the project team in yet another direction.
Once you start to go into functional builds, there is usually a logic to follow – see our past article 4 types of pre-production prototypes before you go into production.
Managing expectations
Why should you know what kind of prototyping takes place and when?
Here’s a way to visualize the different prototyping tracks you’ll pursue before you even start to work on production tooling.
While there is some overlap, you’ve got quite different types of prototypes being made for different reasons, the first to validate look and feel, and the second to validate functionality. All of this takes time, but skipping steps to save time will often lead to quality, reliability, and other problems once you go into production.
Finally, the learnings are combined into early look- and work-like prototypes and their validation leads to a freeze on product design and to commissioning tooling to be fabricated (that’s usually the right approach if you want to avoid too big of a a leap of faith when it comes to pulling the trigger on tooling).
The look- and work-like prototypes made with parts coming off tooling are the prototypes buyers can expect to be similar to mass-production units. And yes, it often does take many iterations to get there.
Some tempering of expectations is required because, as you can see, for a medium-complexity innovative product, it can take 6 to 9 months to get to this point.
Who’s involved?
The prototyping process involves bringing together people from various disciplines: supply chain and quality for picking & qualifying the component suppliers, ID + ME, electronic + firmware + sometimes also app, etc. Again, this helps to explain why you should expect the process to take several months, as getting so many teams to work on different aspects and then bring it all together is fairly time-consuming.
