Common Product Development Problems – We Could Bring More Products to Market if We Had More Design and Engineering Resources
Are you concerned about not getting enough products to market or worried that products with a strong potential may never make it to market because you don’t have enough design and engineering resources? Do you get frustrated when you have to prioritize which products you’re going to develop or when you have to eliminate good product ideas? This is a product development problem that we see all to often.
Wouldn’t it be great to have the ability to develop every product idea that your company comes up with? Unfortunately, that is not the typical case. More often than not, companies come up with more good ideas than they’re able to develop. They don’t have enough internal resources to develop every good idea, so they are forced to prioritize or more likely eliminate good, money-making ideas.
The lack of internal resources could be manpower resources or money resources. There’s no doubt that it’s expensive to develop a new product, and if a lack of sufficient money is keeping your company from developing more products, then it’s obvious that product ideas will need to be prioritized and eliminated. However, if the reason your company isn’t developing more products is because of a lack of manpower resources, that is a situation that, in the end, is actually costing the company revenue.
In the current economic climate, it’s understandable that companies are hesitant to hire – especially highly skilled designers and engineers that often come with a higher price. But, it’s still something a company should explore. If the products that are not being developed do, in fact, show a high probability of being profitable, then a quick cost analysis should show that hiring additional design and engineering staff would actually be profitable investment for the company.
What if you only have a few additional products that could be developed – a situation where additional design and engineering staff would not be used at full capacity? Or, maybe you’re still concerned about adding dedicated staff because, even though you currently have more products to develop than possible, you don’t know what the following year might bring. There are still options available to get those other products developed.
Outsourcing some of your product design is an effective way to not only develop more products but also to control the size of your staff and it’s related cost. One company we work with does that exact thing. They maintain a conservatively sized design and engineering staff. When they see an opportunity to expand their market by developing more products, they outsource the design and engineering. If and when budget cuts come, or when the number of products to be developed decreases, the outsourced work is eliminated allowing the company to maintain that constant level of dedicated staff. Then, as budgets or the number of products to be developed are increased, they call us back in.
The above scenario not only allows the company to operate within a specified and annually varying budget it also allows them to maintain a stable work environment for their in house staff. If they were to add and remove employees as the budget is moved, the result would be a very unstable work environment. Instead, they’re staff has the benefit of stability and as a result there is very little turnover.
Impulse Product Development is a team of experienced product development professionals based in Indianapolis, Indiana. We’ve helped many clients work through the challenges of getting products to market and the need for fluctuating staffing requirements. If you would like to discuss the challenges that you’re struggling with, please contact us today.