Congratulations! You’ve made it through the development process, and you’re selling a validated product.
Does this mean everything’s perfect and we can walk off into the sunset?
I bet you already know the answer. No, we can’t.
Vendors change.
Unexpected issues show up in the field.
Cost reduction.
Quality improvement.
Those are a few of the things we can focus on during the Sustaining Engineering phase of our product’s life.
It would be easy to think that “new features” would fall into this category as well, but I’d recommend thinking about something new as a new, but smaller engineering cycle, starting back at Proof of Concept or Concept Validation, and working through the process from start to finish.
Of course, we don’t have to perform sustaining engineering, but if we’re trying to build a company and a product that will last, it usually helps to keep paying attention to what we’re producing, and keep making it better.
-Brian Schoolcraft
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