Launching a Product? She Wrote the Book On It
By Patrick L. Kennedy
At last, after all the long, painful hours of toil and trial—the ideation, the research, the design, the assembly, the testing—you have in your hands a prototype of your product. And it works! Now it’s a simple matter of finding a factory to replicate this gizmo, and then tallying the sales.
Not so fast, says Professor of the Practice Anna Thornton (ME). After 20 years of consulting for companies large and small, Thornton can tell you that product development teams at the prototype stage consistently imagine they’re within sight of the finish line, when in fact they’re in the eighth mile of a marathon.
Thornton, who has been teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in manufacturing and product realization at ENG for four years, could never find a textbook that collated all the lessons she’s learned about bringing a product to market. So she wrote one. Product Realization: Going from One to a Million (Wiley, February 2021) is a readable, no-nonsense guide to every step of the product launch process, peppered with cautionary tales and success stories from the real world.
“There’s a real gap in the way students are trained,” says Thornton. “Most courses in product design are focused on the exciting front end. Design thinking, concept into a prototype—all important, but in my experience, most of the really hard problems companies face are in that transition from prototype to market, in getting to where you can produce it reliably and repeatedly.”
Thornton’s advice isn’t just for wet-behind-the-ears startups. She’s helped launch products at companies of all sizes, across industries, from aerospace and sports equipment to consumer electronics and medical devices.
“Every company has the same issues,” says Thornton, such as underestimating the costs of tooling and the time spent on packaging design. “Almost every single one has trouble with document management, misses a quality test, doesn’t listen to their manufacturer and thinks they know better, and that bites them in the backside.”
Even companies like Tesla have notoriously over-promised and under-delivered. “They’re running into the same things I’ve seen happening at companies over and over and over again,” says Thornton. “There are so many variables involved—in the factory, in operations, forecasting, supply chain—all these things occurring at the same time. It’s an incredibly cross-disciplinary problem.”
More than that, hardware entrepreneurs must be ready to wade through a morass of specification documents, quality plans, bills of materials, cash flow analysis, and legal and regulatory requirements.
Product developers of all experience levels can benefit from reading Product Realization, but Thornton shares a few key points here, in the form of questions that teams should be able to answer.
Is your technology actually ready?
“I think people overestimate how ready they are,” says Thornton. “I get a lot of questions about outsourcing production from students, and my response is, ‘Lean back a little; you’re over the tips of your skis. Let’s make sure your product is ready for production.’ I always think of that quote from Scotty in Star Trek: ‘I can’t change the laws of physics!’”
Do you have a comprehensive specification document?
“Not just how the product is going to function, but have you thought through how it’s going to be used? I often use the example of a wireless mouse. This thing is going to bounce around in my briefcase. It sits in a cold car, it sits in a hot car, it gets coffee spilled on it. We often focus on the core function; however, we need to define what it means for the product to work for thousands of people in a thousand different ways.”
Have you designed for manufacturability?
“Can your designs be built? Have you thought through the manufacturing process?” CAD and additive manufacturing give teams a false sense of security about manufacturing. Just because you can CAD it and print it doesn’t mean that you can make it on mass production equipment.
Do you have a good sense of how much this thing is going to cost?
“Often, if you look at a failed product, it was a fine product but it couldn’t be produced at a price point that the customer was willing to pay. So have you thought through the true cost?” Teams need to estimate their cost of goods early and often to make sure they are on the right track.
Thornton’s book is attracting interest from the hardware startup community and academic programs, and she’s received a slew of invitations to speak at accelerators across the country.
“It’s giving me an opportunity to advocate for this kind of class, and also to get some visibility for BU’s Product Design and Manufacturing master’s program,” Thornton says. “BU’s a really great hub for hardware development, with the Build Lab and EPIC. We’ve got these incredible resources, where you can design a really cool product—and then you actually have to make it.”