The hidden costs of speed ⏩⏩💸💸

How quickly should I bring my product into production?

As fast as possible, of course! The sooner we start selling, the sooner we can start making money.

While that might be true, I’d argue that the right answer is more like this:

As fast as I can manage with an appropriate level of risk.

The key difference is that I’m now engaging thoughtfully with the risk side of the equation, and not only looking at the upside.

Some risk is necessary, even good, in order for our business to survive and succeed. The key is to choose your risk wisely.

If I’m moving so fast that I’m not documenting design changes, this won’t directly impact my ability to sell. But it will definitely impact my ability to support my product in the field. If we’re making a cheap or simple product, this probably doesn’t matter.

If it’s something more complicated that needs to be serviced during a warranty claim, all of a sudden our service techs don’t know what they’re working on, and we waste valuable time and money figuring out how this unit was built before we can even diagnose the problem.

What about if we cut our test program short, selling before we have confidence in our long term reliability? Everything looks great for the first six months, then all of a sudden 50 percent of the units we’ve sold fail, and become expensive warranty claims. Not good!

You’ll never know with certainty which risks are the right risks, but let’s try to give it an honest look and make the best decisions we can!

-Brian Schoolcraft

What layers of the design do I need to own?

As always, it depends 🙂 It depends where and why your product is innovating in your market. 

Maybe your product is based on a revolutionary idea, one of those “why didn’t I think of that” moments, but the execution is relatively simple. In that case, you probably don’t need to own and control much of the design record. Most of your product’s value is in your vision and marketing, so a functional description and maybe component designs are all you really need, and you can leave the finer details up to whatever manufacturing partner you’re working with currently.

However, if your product is highly technical or complex, then your approach should be much different. If it takes a lot of learning or training to be able to produce your product, then we probably want to own most if not all of the design record. 

Here are a couple good questions to ask yourself as you decide what’s worth owning yourself:Will it be hard/expensive to reproduce this piece of the design record?

If this piece of the design record disappeared tomorrow, would it impact my business in a significant way?

If you answered yes to one of those, you should probably consider keeping that work “in house”. If you answered yes to both, then you definitely should!

Don’t give up the keys to your product!

-Brian Schoolcraft

Design Records are like Onions

Let’s discuss our Design Record in a bit more detail. So far, we’ve defined it as “everything it takes to get your product built and shipped - without tribal knowledge”.

That’s admittedly a pretty wide definition. Let’s break it down into a few levels so it’s easier to talk about.

1. Functional Descriptions
   

   These are your high level system diagrams. If we’re trying to describe how our product works to someone, this is where we start.
   

   At this level, we’re talking about block diagrams, concept sketches, process flowcharts, performance calculation spreadsheets and models, and similar high level documents.
   

2. Component Designs We’re starting to describe each piece of the product in detail at this point. This level of detail begins to help us make sure our parts fit together, pick out components from suppliers, and begin reviewing our designs with our suppliers. We’re looking at CAD solid models, electrical system schematics, wire harness diagrams, hydraulic schematics, and other documents that capture the details of each component in our system.
   

3. Detail Designs This is where we start capturing our design in a way that we can communicate (very clearly) with the outside world. It gets a little harder to see the higher level function of the system or component, but that’s not the point of this layer. We’re making sure we capture every little detail of each piece of our system, so that we can send this to a manufacturer and get the parts we want back. Some good examples are detailed drawings (dimensioned and toleranced), PCB board designs, cut sheets for hoses and wire harnesses, and detailed BOMs for each subassembly.
   

4. Production Documentation We’ve handed our detail designs to a manufacturer (internal or external), but the CNC Machines, Injection Molding Presses, PCB Fab Machines, etc. can’t read our drawings! The manufacturers translate our detail designs into something the machines can understand, sometimes making special tooling to go along with the machine programs too. This level of our design record might include CNC G-Code programs, solder stencils, injection molding tools, pick and place programs, custom fixtures or forms, and anything else that the manufacturer might use to make our product.

What layer of design are you used to working with? What layers do you have direct control over?

-Brian Schoolcraft