While there are as many product development methodologies as there are engineering design services in the world, at DE Design Works we use a simple product development funnel in our proposal process to help break your project into smaller, definable steps. The following infographic provides a helpful overview of a typical new product development.

At DE Design Works, we help many different customers in their product development efforts. We answer proposal requests for a good roster of global companies, many mid-sized customers with specialized products in the business-to-business industrial segment, medical customers large and small, and a never-ending stream of start-ups with product ideas aimed at all sorts of unfilled product needs. The common theme among all of those customer opportunities is that there is no common place for us to begin as an outside engineering services resource, and there is certainly no common “ballpark cost” to do their project.

We also have a few different ways to visualize how the product development process works. Each potential customer and industry have their own terms, acronyms, and common certifications they are trying to align with. But common again in all of those infographics and buzzwords is that there is no hard-edged “process” to get a potential customer from where they are today to the finish line – it is ALWAYS a fluid, blurry assessment of where to begin and how to proceed.

Our best common statements for any potential product developer is that YOU are the product expert with your product and we are available to help you overcome the technical electronics and embedded software barriers to getting your project delivered on time and on budget.

• You can best define the requirements of the product (often without any technical expertise).
• You can describe the environmental specification your product will be used in.
• You can decide at what points you will need to do key risk analysis in order to steer your product development coarse.
• You can describe the use case factors.
• You can create the voice of customer expectations.
• You can begin the critical component block diagram.
• You can establish the target cost and the first year production volume expectations.
• You can create physical ideation concepts and drawings for clarity.

Of course, WE can come in at any point along the way and add our technical expertise to your documents, and we can support the completion of any specification documents should that be something your company is just not resourced to do.