Demolish These 6 Dangerous Pitfalls That Devastate Your Product Development

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Developing a new physical product and bringing it to market is an exciting journey - but it's also filled with potential pitfalls that can sink your project.

After talking to countless innovators and entrepreneurs over the years, I’ve seen these manufacturing mistakes happen again and again.

But the good news is that they can almost always be avoided if you know what to look out for.

In this week’s newsletter, I want to share the 6 most common product development pitfalls I see trip people up, along with proven solutions to help you steer clear of them.

Avoiding these mistakes can save you a huge amount of time, money, and headaches down the road.

Whether you’re just starting to plan out your new product idea or are knee-deep in manufacturing, you’ll find tips below to avoid derailment.

Let’s dive in...

1. Not having detailed product specifications <br>(and later wishing you did)

One of the biggest sources of problems I see is not investing upfront in detailed product specifications and documentation.

Without specs that clearly lay out:

• Materials

• Dimensions

• Tolerances

• Testing protocols

• Other requirements

…miscommunications and mistakes are almost inevitable.

The solution is to invest time early on to create a thorough product requirements document.

This is your blueprint that covers all the details needed to precisely manufacture your product.

Be sure to include:

• Technical drawings

• Material specs

• Quality standards

• Testing protocols

• Regulatory requirements

Review this closely with any potential manufacturers.

This upfront alignment will pay dividends later.

2. Picking the wrong manufacturing partner for your product

Choosing an inexperienced manufacturer or one that doesn’t specialize in products similar to yours is a recipe for delays, quality issues, and extra costs down the road.

I’ve seen far too many teams realize this too late.

The key here is vetting:

Thoroughly evaluate potential manufacturing partners.

• Look for proven experience manufacturing similar products.

• Quality certifications like ISO 9001.

• Consistently positive online reviews.

• Evidence they can scale production as you grow.

Check references diligently.

Taking the time to find the right partner will be one of the best decisions you make.

3. Being surprised by (and not budgeting for) tooling costs

Here’s a common pitfall:

not adequately planning for custom tooling costs.

Molds, dies, jigs, and other tools needed to produce custom parts can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Being surprised by these costs halfway through a project can completely sink it.

The solution is planning:

understand all projected tooling costs upfront.

Get quotes on both one-time and recurring tooling costs.

Make sure to account for this in your product development budget and timeline.

Factor in contingency too.

With good planning, you won’t get caught off guard.

4. Skipping iterations and jumping right to production

In the rush to get to market, some teams skip prototyping iterations entirely and go straight to production tooling and inventory.

Without testing multiple prototypes, issues that are expensive to fix inevitably come up late.

The fix is prototyping:

Build multiple generations of prototypes and test them extensively with your target users.

Refine the design based on user feedback and lessons learned before finalizing it for production.

Yes, this takes more upfront time and money.

But finding issues late can kill a project.

5. Only planning for one production run

Given long lead times, it’s tempting to bet everything on one large production run.

But for most new products, several incremental runs are needed to refine quality before getting it right.

Just one can lead to insufficient inventory.

The best strategy is starting small:

Plan for multiple smaller production runs to roll out slowly.

This allows improvements between runs as real customer feedback comes in.

Budget extra time and money for this ramp-up phase.

Slowly ramp up inventory as quality improves.

6. Forgetting regulatory certifications

Depending on your product, essential regulatory safety and compliance certifications like CE, FCC, and UL can take months to complete - but are required to legally sell many products.

Forgetting this can threaten your whole launch.

The key is researching early:

Understand certification requirements early on.

Build in time and costs of testing and documentation collection into your project timeline and budget.

Don’t let certifications turn into a last-minute scramble.

Final thoughts

Avoiding common product development pitfalls takes diligence, planning, and careful partner selection.

But investing time upfront to do things right will pay off with a smoothly run manufacturing launch and higher quality product.

What pitfalls have you encountered?

Let me know!

Talk soon,

Roy

Whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

1. Raise crowdfunding: We can help you turn your product prototype into an investible asset. If you’ve got a working prototype, and need funding to scale, send me a direct message on Linkedin (click here) saying “funding” for more details on how we can help.
   

2. Validate your physical product concept: Got a concept (napkin sketch or full concept design) for a killer product? We want to see it. Click here to submit it for review.
   

3. Free Guide - Crowdfunding 101: How to prepare your physical product for a crowdfunding campaign. Click here to learn more.