Key Takeaways
- Established companies with strong internal engineering teams regularly use design firms to handle specialized work and bandwidth overflow.
- The most common trigger for hiring an external engineering partner is product managers demanding new features while the core team handles maintenance.
- Design firms provide flexible engineering capacity without the hiring risk, onboarding time, and overhead of full-time staff additions.
- External partners work best as a team extension — not a replacement — when project requirements and success criteria are clearly defined upfront.
- If your product roadmap is stalling because of team capacity, an engineering design firm can accelerate delivery without requiring headcount growth.
Our Customers’ Top 5 (Okay, 6) Electronics Product Engineering Pain Points
It’s a bit tricky to explain why successful global companies with strong product engineering teams turn to independent product development partners like DE Design Works. Every time we try to write the definitive piece, it turns into a 3,000-word snoozer with too many nuances.
We stare at it. We sigh. We shelve it.
This 7-minute read is our attempt at a more useful version – distilled, clear, and maybe even a bit therapeutic for all experienced product developers. It’s based on real-world pain points our New Project Team has heard time and again from prospective customers across various industries. If you're responsible for product management or technical strategy, this list may hit close to home.
The 5 most common pain points we see:
- Our engineers are too busy supporting current products to work on new features.
- We need embedded IoT support to connect our old and new products to the cloud.
- We need more reliable wireless technology for our products.
- Our product was built by one brilliant person years ago—now we need a team.
- We need help integrating one or more industrial communications protocols (like Modbus, CAN bus, or Ethernet/IP).
- BONUS!! Keeping up with new technology is hard, and costly—we need help with a reliable product roadmap and improved profitability.
If one (or all) of these are uncomfortably familiar, you’re not alone. Here's the breakdown of each.
1. Our engineers are too busy sustaining current products
This is hands-down the most common challenge we hear: “Our product managers are demanding [insert cool new features], but our team is swamped keeping our current products and customers running.”
New technology and features can be challenging, while manufacturing support, software bugs, and FAE customer support keeps product engineers pulled into sustaining mode. This leaves no room for technology innovation or long-term, next-generation projects.
DE Design Works repeatedly slots in as an extension of our large-customer engineering teams. Our engineers provide:
- Decades of experience in PCB layout and design (we use Altium 365 for easy collaboration)
- Embedded firmware and software expertise (our largest group of engineers)
- Mechanical and systems engineering
- HMI and UI/UX development
- Prototyping efficiently to dramatically reduce development timelines
- Testing and validation early for an efficient certification process later
We have a long history of integrating directly with your engineering team. Our flat organizational structure allows a direct pipeline to our engineers. Additionally, DE brings deep technical horsepower, and—here’s the kicker—you own all the work. From Git repos to source files to schematics, you’ll have complete control and transparency to make future decisions with or without DE Design Works.
2. We need device-level IoT support to speak the language of our cloud team
IoT is everywhere, but our customers have realized that making your product “cloud-connected” is more complex than it sounds. To accomplish digital transformation goals, many companies already have (or are building) a cloud backend—often on AWS or Azure—but struggle to bridge the gap between physical devices in the field and digital infrastructure in the cloud.
We help with:
- Embedded hardware and firmware to collect edge data
- Secure, reliable communications (employing ideal middleware choices such as MQTT, Zephyr, Yocto, Buildroot, FreeRTOS, just to name a few)
- Legacy product add-ons to enable modern connectivity
- Cloud onboarding and remote provisioning capabilities
Your internal IT team is great at determining data needs and building secure, customer-facing dashboards – but getting raw sensor data from a field-deployed device into the cloud takes embedded smarts and vast experience to select the most effective tools for your data needs. We bring the experience of bridging that language barrier from the physical edge device to the cloud infrastructure.
3. Our wireless tech isn’t reliable enough
Wireless headaches are real. Wi-Fi often doesn’t have the range or robustness if not implemented by experienced hardware and firmware design engineers. Similarly, Bluetooth can be flakey in noisy environments. And consumer-grade wireless just doesn’t cut it for industrial or mission-critical applications. If pushing data reliably is a problem for your existing products in noisy factories, remote sites, or over long distances, we help evaluate the current pain points and can implement ideal solutions for improved performance.
Often, we help customers choose better wireless solutions, including:
- LoRa for long-range, low-power communication
- Wi-Fi HaLow for industrial Wi-Fi applications
- Cellular (LTE-M, NB-IoT) for always-on coverage without dependency on site networks
We tailor the solution to your product’s environment, power budget, and bandwidth needs – and make sure it actually works in the real world.
4. We are ready to grow our product development capacity – we need a partner that has all the product development expertise that we can tap into as-needed
Your product was built by a wizard. Now the wizard is overloaded, gone, or simply needs support of experts with more diverse capabilities. Your company also needs to maintain firmware repos, professionalize version control, update PCB hardware designs for modern manufacturing, and document specifications and testing so that you’re not relying on tribal knowledge. You need a team of specialists to accommodate your growth.
Partnering with DE Design Works can instantly provide experienced personnel with highly specialized skills such as:
- Experienced PCB design
- Embedded firmware expertise
- Software and applications development
- Optimal systems architecture
- Industrial design & user interface design
- Mechanical & CAD structural design
- Experienced test engineering with your certification goals in mind
- Someone to manage all of them
DE Design Works becomes your secret weapon, as we are for a handful of global manufacturing companies. You can plug into our fully-formed, tightly integrated engineering team:
- Hardware, firmware, and software engineers who actually talk to each other
- Deep specialization in embedded systems, industrial protocols, power design, UI/UX, testing, and certifications
- Flexibility to ramp up or down as your project needs shift
- Transparent project management and billing (we invoice twice a month and keep you in the loop)
And just like always: you own the work. Source code, schematics, design files – it’s all yours.
We’re not just filling gaps – we’re helping you scale without adding overhead.
5. We need to add one or more industrial communication protocols
Your customers are asking for compatibility. That usually means your product has to talk Modbus, CAN bus, Ethernet/IP, BACnet, or another awkwardly capitalized protocol.
We’ve been around this block many times before. We know how to:
- Implement industrial protocols in embedded systems
- Design hardware interfaces that meet timing and voltage specs
- Ensure interoperability with PLCs and other factory systems
- Help your product pass the tests that keep procurement teams happy
From CANopen to Profinet, we’ve got the experience to get your product talking to the rest of the system – and doing it reliably.
6. We can’t keep up with technology—we need help with our product roadmap
Let’s face it: staying on top of component availability, emerging protocols, connectivity trends, and cloud integrations is exhausting. It’s also not the best use of your internal team’s time.
We help customers step back and ask the big questions:
- Are we using the right microcontroller family for long-term support?
- Is this wireless stack still going to be viable five years from now?
- How do we optimize cost, power, and performance in the next generation?
- What’s the most profitable way to evolve our product platform?
Whether it’s part of our Assessment to begin a design project, or a full product roadmap exercise, we help you make smart technical decisions that align with business goals.
Bottom Line
These pain points aren’t signs of weakness – they’re signs that your product is evolving, your company is growing, and your internal team is doing everything it can to keep up.
At DE Design Works, we provide plug-and-play engineering expertise that fits your workflow, flexes with your projects, and helps you reach your goals faster – with less stress and no black-box IP handcuffs.
Let’s build something better together – our New Project Team is always willing to hop on a 30-minute online meeting to compare your pain points with our capabilities.
Frequently Asked Questions
When should an established company hire an external electronics engineering design firm?
The most common trigger is product managers demanding new features or products while the internal engineering team is fully committed to maintaining existing products. Other clear signals are: a product requires specialized expertise your team doesn't have, you're facing a deadline that requires more engineering bandwidth than you can hire for, or you need to validate a technology decision independently.
What is the difference between an engineering design firm and a contract manufacturer?
A contract manufacturer (CM) builds products from a completed design — they provide manufacturing services, not engineering. An engineering design firm like DE Design Works provides the engineering: schematic design, PCB layout, firmware development, prototyping, and production transfer. The design firm produces the design package that the CM then manufactures.
How do large companies with strong internal engineering teams use design firms?
Established companies most commonly use design firms for: specialized technology integration their team lacks expertise in (specific wireless protocols, new processor architectures), bandwidth overflow during product launch cycles, independent design validation to catch errors their team might miss, and separating new product development from maintenance work that would otherwise block it.
What should be defined before engaging an electronics engineering design firm?
Define before engagement: what the product must do (functional requirements), what it must not do or exceed (constraints — cost, size, power, regulatory), how success will be measured (acceptance criteria), and who owns which decisions. Engaging a design firm without clear requirements shifts the burden of requirements definition to the engagement itself, which is expensive and often produces misaligned deliverables.
What are the risks of relying on an external engineering firm as a long-term dependency?
The main risk is IP and knowledge transfer — if documentation is inadequate, changing vendors or bringing engineering in-house becomes very costly. Mitigate this by requiring complete design documentation as a deliverable (schematics, BOMs, firmware source, test procedures), ensuring all IP is assigned to your company in the contract, and maintaining internal engineering ownership of the architecture decisions even when execution is outsourced.