Product Design for Cutthroat Pricing: Start Making Friends

The message of this post came to mind after reading a post by DT at DesignSojourn, entitled 25 Bad Habits of Industrial Designers.  A few of the bad habits mentioned, specifically No. 11 and No. 13 ("not being friends with engineering" and "not being friends with marketing", respectively), got me thinkin’. 

Here is a product development approach geared towards failure which I often see in markets with high price sensitivity: 

Someone designs the product.  Someone engineers the product.  Someone applies for a patent on the product.  Someone prototypes the product.  Someone sources offshore manufacturing on the product. 

                                                              (quick breath…)

The tooling cost or unit cost of the product, even offshore, is out of the ballpark in terms of the organization’s cost targets AND/OR the materials or processes called out by the design will not be matched exactly offshore. 

The organization seeks the cheapest source and gets burned on quality, payment, or both, OR, the organization redesigns for manufacturing cost and feasibility overseas.  Design and engineering costs go up.  The patent claims become constrictive or are negated entirely.  Time to market is increased.  And the product manager, CEO, or whoever in charge puts on 20 lbs through stress induced over-eating.

I see this happen often in industries that are very price competitive, because if you are off by 5% – 10%, you’re out of the ballgame. 

Some might say this is just part of the development process.  Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but onward we plod with a success rate that looks more like a baseball batting average.

Design is getting a lot of attention these days and that is good. Who doesn’t like a well-designed product?   But…this also might encourage designers to feel they don’t need friends in engineering, marketing, and manufacturing.  Yes, I’m talking to the guy wearing the black turtleneck. 

What would happen, if 3/4 of the way through the design or prototyping process, a designer called up a few other people in other departments or companies and asked for feedback?  Do they risk having their creativity crushed?  Do they risk a flurry of rejections that could kill inspiration?  Maybe. 

But, what if they learned that modifying their design could reduce the tooling cost by 30%?  Or, if the material they plan on using to give their product that "look", will increase the unit cost by a dollar.  Perhaps they might learn that their product is just plain large and heavy, and reducing it’s size will reduce both the unit cost and shipping costs.  Quite often, designing a product to look "cool" adds cost.  Will the market bear that cost?

Good, experienced, industrial designers are often familiar with a lot of these issues.  But in today’s world, in which people often need to specialize a great deal in a given craft in order to excel and become distinguished in their field, there is less time and energy to invest in learning about complimentary aspects of the business. 

Thus, the ability to make and collaborate with other specialists is a skill/habit that is becoming more valuable.

If it’s price sensitive, you need to start making friends with everything (everyone) that impacts cost.  If it’s going to be made overseas (after all, it’s price sensitive), feedback from overseas early on will tell you if you’re on the right track or not, and will probably save you steps in the long run.   Save that product design from the trash and start getting friendly.