What to Do When You’re Stuck in the Engineering Phase of Product Development

Engineers are known for being meticulous—and it’s easy to understand why: they’re responsible for ensuring that critical parts function properly, so they spend a lot of time perfecting every detail of the product development process

But as the saying goes, “perfect is the enemy of good.” Getting stuck in the engineering phase can be a serious drain on time and money. 

At a certain point, the resources spent on iteration could be better allocated to sales and marketing efforts for your product. Because design, prototyping, and even initial production are all up front investments. You won’t make a dollar back until your first product is actually sold.

Are you caught in the trap of continuous iteration? Are those new and improved features you keep adding creating a bottleneck in your manufacturing timeline? 

It may be time to stop iterating and move forward to production.

How Polyhistor Can Help You Move into Production 

Polyhistor specializes in making your product succeed. Here’s how we help you accelerate market introduction and reduce your costs: 

1. Create a functioning prototype. You should have a physical representation of your part that actually works. Going into full-scale production with only a napkin sketch simply isn’t an option. The first step is to evaluate whether or not you’re prepared to move forward into production. There’s no need to rush this part of the process. We want to make sure that there are no loose ends when it comes to your product’s success. So we’ll check and double check all the boxes of our proven product development process to make sure your prototype works exactly as intended.

2. Distinguish the “need to have” from the “nice to have.” If you keep adding desired features to your part, you’ll never be able to start producing it! A good rule of thumb is to differentiate between functional issues and cosmetic issues. We’ll help you prioritize design changes that are critical to the function of the part while negotiating whether certain cosmetic upgrades are really necessary. If it’s an internal part, for example, you may be able to forgo cosmetic changes in version one—and potentially incorporate them in a future release.

3. Perform testing. It’s important to perform both functional testing and market testing before moving a product to mass production. Functional testing will help you determine whether your prototype works as intended. Does it hold up at the required temperatures and environments? Will it last for the desired lifespan? 

In turn, market testing gives you the opportunity to receive valuable customer feedback and determine if your product is sellable. It also affords you a glimpse into what your target customer is really looking for. Not sure if a product feature is a “nice to have” or a must have”? Use market testing to discover how much that particular feature matters to your customers. 

If you’re still feeling stuck, remember that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing an initial release of your product and improving it over time. As brands like Apple have shown us, releasing updated versions of your product can actually be a future sales generator.

If you have a part that you think is ready for production, send it over to Polyhistor and have us assess it for you. Our team of engineers will help you evaluate if you need more time on the drawing board or if it’s time to stop iterating and get to market.

 
Don’t get stuck in the engineering phase! Let Polyhistor help move your part into production. Get a quote from us today.