Product Management – Taiwan the Heart of Asia, the Island Country of Hardware Innovation.

Hardware is hard, but not that hard.

Even your dear mom went to Costco to prepare delicious meals for families, she still finds it a challenging job. In fact, there are some basic rules to follow to develop a hardware product. Here In this blog, Dennis will reveal you some techniques from his pocket. The development of a hardware product, from the very beginning idea to mass production, we can divide it into two stages:
1. POC, Proof of Concept proof of concept
2. MP, Mass-production
The challenges that start-up teams faced in these two phases are extremely different.

From 0 to 1, get your first POC ready

POC, Proof of Concept refers to from 0 to1. A concept that has been in your mind for a long time and turns it into a set of model/mockup/prototype that can represent your original ideas. Once done, such a rough prototype is no longer ambiguous for storytelling. It can be touched and felt from engineering point of view. However, the set of Proof of concept is just good enough for R&D team to see the whole picture, to take reference for the next step of optimization and improvement.

Once the Proof of concept is complete, the next step is to optimize it. This optimization process is called EVT, Engineering Verification Test. Because this POC uses the materials around you and might be Ardunio development board is used (if you know coding as well), most of the cases are: ugly, the casing is broken, the circuit is easily disconnected, and you can’t take it to see the potential customers or the angels who may be interested in your project, consumers are even less likely to spend money on your junk, and you have to quickly rebuild it and make it looks as sexy as possible. Now you have to co-work with external resources to make this happen. At this moment, you need at least four professionals to assist you:
1. ID, Industrial designer, or product designer
2. ME, Mechanical engineer
3. EE, Electrical engineer
4. PM, Product manager

Through the collaboration of above professional designers, engineers, and PMs, at this stage of EVT, we completed the sexy appearance, mechanical structure that meets mass production requirements, and size-optimized PCB. Appearance and function, both beautiful and operable. It looks like a working prototype very close to commercial production. With this set of functional models, start-up teams can start doing the following things that might with chance to change your whole life:
1. Go to make a crowdfunding video.
2. Go to potential angels to raise funds.
3. Go to buyers for order.

From DVT stage, preparing for mass-production

After the completion of EVT, there are stages such as DVT, PVT, MP…etc. There are different levels of challenges waiting for the startups team. We will not reveal too much implementation details in this article, let everyone have a whole picture of how hardware product is developed. Simply put, this article is like a subway map to let the startups team know: Where they are now? Where is the next stop and where should they get off the train. With future blog posts, more details will be revealed for your reference.

As mentioned earlier, Dennis has an industrial designer background, has been a product manager for 10+ years, is the head of international marketing and business departments, and has served in the mold injection molding factory in past 20 years career. After setting up his own company, it is committed to providing global hardware startups from 0 to 1 to mass production service and has many years of practical experience. The posts in this blog are all original created by Dennis. He is delighted for sharing his painstaking with everyone here.