Inventors, engineers and designers often become paralyzed by perfectionism. Getting your product just right has benefits, but also some real costs and evaluating them rationally instead of just constantly going back to the drawing board is important. To do this analysis an inventor needs to fully understand the costs of heading to market with an imperfect product or redesigning.

The costs of perfectionism:

1.  Time to market:  As you make revisions, there are other people willing to go to market with an imperfect product.  If you have ever been working on a product for years and some thing similar but not as good launches, this lesson is a hard one to learn.  Lets say that you launch 6 months later than you competition with a better product, now you are faced with the daunting task of trying to unseat them at retailers.  The conversation will probably go something like, but we have something similar and it selling (well or badly, it doesn’t really matter) and we have already set up operating arrangements with them.  There are lots of examples of products that were late to market and surpassed a first mover (they are well publicized), but as a whole most items on the rack were the first to market.

2.  Development costs: No matter how you decide to improve, whether it be a CAD redesign, a new industrial design, or another prototype these are all extra costs.  Often it isn’t the first redesign that affects the projects overall budget, but when you start redesigning and redesigning it becomes a habit and costs will escalate.

The benefits of perfectionism

1.  Product Improvement.  Hopefully after going back and redesigning the product works better, looks more pleasing is cheaper to produce or another important product characteristic.

2.  Easier Market Launch:  With a perfect product, marketing, selling and getting retailers should be easier.  There will be no bad press about this function or that because everything will work beautifully.  And of course the market is much less likely to reject the idea if there are no flaws.

3. Personal Reflection:  Knowing what you put out into the market or in front of potential licensees is important for your brain.  The anxiety of knowing that one more thing should be done disappears if everything is just right.

Other things to think about

Products rarely go through one generation.  If your product is successful, improvements will be necessary no matter what.  In fact, there is a number of cases when redesigns and subsequent versions made more money than the original (IPod!).  Often times going for perfect is also an indication of focusing on technology push (the solution) over market pull (the problem).  If your focus is on solving the problem, then you know when the product is good enough because it solves the problem.  However, when you are focused on the solution the drive to improve upon a solution beyond what is actually required is a common tendancy.

Where does this conflict come from?

Often this issue arises when you get inventors with different backgrounds.  A former corporate inventor who worked in a business setting knows that the bottom line of development costs drives product launch as much as development actually being done.  While heartbreaking the first time, an inventor in this position realizes that the product will either sink or swim and often the further development would not have influenced the market acceptance.  An entrepreneur inventor focuses on development costs and first to market.  These forces drive the entrepreneur to deliver a product that is good enough, while knowing that improvements can be made for the second version.  When inventing is your hobby, redesigns and further development is part of the fun.  Unfortunately this is often where inventors get stuck, spend a lot of money only to find that their product has been launched an move onto another idea.

How Do You Know If You Are Done?

The quick answer is prototype, test and ask the market.  If you have something that works and people like, then you are done.  If you get substantial (you will never please everyone, but when 9/10 people from your target market say X, its substantial) feedback leading you to a different direction then you might want go back and work on it.

IS YOUR PRODUCT DONE?

As we are beginning the CAD work for a new product today, I thought I would relay two important insight that are often missed by first timers.  Moving from 2-D to 3-D can be strenuous, so here is some help.

1.  Often 2-D drawings don’t account for requirements like board size, hand size, etc.  It might not be possible to get your napkin drawing into a functional product identical to your sketch.  When you incorporate those into a 3-D CAD, often the style can be altered.  Unfortunately, form follows function (don’t know where that comes from but it is a rule of thumb) and so let the style change but retain its core features.

2. Another very important point of CAD design is to go phase by phase.  As we have never prototyped this part before, we are looking for the first round of testing.  Will the design work?  Will the product be comfortable to use?  Is the sizing correct?  These are a few of the basic questions we would like to answer, or facilitate our client to answer.  However often first timers having heard of design for manufacture (DFM) and perhaps because they are eager to get the product on the shelf get lost here.  Do you need part structural analysis, draft / rib design, snap fit design?  No!  Why invest in making a part production ready, when you don’t really know it will work!  More importantly, the testing will often require changing the design a little.  If you change a dimension, all of the production ready designing needs to be altered as well, costing more and more. If you wait to do make the design production ready until it has passed at least the first round of prototyping, you will save a lot of money, time and head ache.

Just a few hints from your friendly neighborhood invention product development consultants at Flashpoint Development.