Yes, I know – it’s been a while since our last post. The last six months have been extraordinarily busy at EastBridge. I’m back on track now to send out monthly updates.
The Cowboy Junkies are a difficult to classify alt country band from Ontario, Canada. They’ve been making beautiful and evocative music since 1985 and recently released a new record titled “Such Ferocious Beauty”. The third track is “Hard to Build. Easy to Break” and it’s terrific.
So… what’s this got to do with new product development and manufacturing? Building anything new, especially from the ground up, is always hard. There are many considerations related to product aesthetics, features and functionality, material selection, the underlying manufacturing methods, regulatory pathway, packaging, and dozens of other factors.
Our process considers and addresses these elements through comprehensive design reviews, BOM validation and localization, model making, multiple rounds of prototyping and engineering builds. But, during the scale-up to volume manufacturing, there is always a cluster of difficult-to-predict edge use cases, component and material interactions, tolerance stack-ups and evolving specifications that combine to make the pre-production units “easy to break”.
This doesn’t mean that the products are irreparably broken or literally fall apart, but rather, minor functionality issues always crop up. The detent on the electronic switch might not feel or sound quite right, the color temperature of the LEDs may not compliment the molded plastic shell, the specified Bluetooth module has gone end of life, or the power cable doesn’t pack neatly and easily into the shipper box.
Unfortunately, all of these factors can’t be predicted in advance via the product requirements document (PRD), product specification or model builds. Some elements emerge during the fabrication process, others materialize from customer testing and our clients’ evolving and shifting requirements.
Realizing that this will happen, we always advise our clients not to fall in love with (or plan to sell) pre-volume production units. As painful as it is, it’s expected to toss dozens if not hundreds of units built during this phase. This stumble in the run up to launch is normal and must be navigated through. Which we do together, building world class products that are (much less) Easy to Break.
Cheers,
Jack Daniels, 617-285-2486
