According to MacroFab’s analysis, 97% of hardware startups fail, and only 24% ever reach the second round of funding. While reasons for failure vary widely, one element to consider is the difficulty of the hardware product development process.
Developing a new hardware product requires extensive ideation and validation, technical knowledge across numerous fields, and budget room to accommodate the entire process. It necessitates involvement from stakeholders across the company, from designers and engineers to product marketers and salespeople.
Read below to understand the hardware product development process in full. We’ll describe what each stage entails and what you should do to set yourself up to beat the odds.
Table of Contents
Stage 1: Concept Strategy and Ideation
The hardware product development process starts with ideation. Brainstorming an idea for a hardware product requires market research to identify a target audience, understand a problem they face, and map the competitive landscape of products that address that problem.
In this stage, it’s critical to identify the pain points customers face when interacting with existing products so that you can design yours in a way that feels tangibly superior. This is critical when developing very early prototypes, such as initial sketches and mockups.
With a problem identified and an initial idea in motion, add detail to the picture with an initial product requirements document (PRD). Your PRD should serve as a hardware product roadmap, aligning all relevant stakeholders on:
- Product design factors like features, UX, and branding
- Positioning factors like purpose, target market, and any other market-specific considerations
- Technical factors like required materials, desired production methods, and shipping constraints
- Universal need-to-knows like design cost constraints, product development timelines, and regulatory considerations
As you develop your PRD, be sure to gather consistent input from your technical teams, such as engineering and manufacturing. This will help you align on a product idea that is actually feasible to design and produce at scale.
Pro tip: Be mindful of feature creep. Adding too many features can increase the product’s complexity, impairing the user experience, driving up costs, and making it harder to produce at scale.
Stage 2: Product Design
| Prototypes Created in the Design Phase | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Category | Low Fidelity | Medium Fidelity | High Fidelity |
| Examples | Sketches, CAD mockups, video prototypes | Foam models, wireframes, horizontal prototypes | Working models, minimum viable product, functional prototypes |
| Materials | Cardboard, foam, paper | 3D prints, CNC foam | Machined metal/plastics, custom PCBs |
| Focus | Basic form factor and initial user feedback | Ergonomics, component placement, UX | Final tests and production validation |
| Development Cost | Low cost | Medium cost | High cost |
| Development Speed | Very rapid iteration | Varies depending on extent of changes | Slow, detailed engineering |
Once all stakeholders are aligned on a product vision, you can begin the formal hardware product design phase. This is where you start developing prototypes. You start with the most rudimentary types of prototypes, such as sketches, 3-D models, and early physical prototypes (typically made using 3-D printers).
Early prototypes should be extensively tested, both internally and externally, for their fundamental elements. Collect feedback on things like ergonomics, user experience, button placement, overall size, spacing, and other defining product features.
Initial engineering work will be necessary to produce physical prototypes and explore possible manufacturing processes. However, keep in mind that hardware development is much easier when you’ve adjusted to user feedback before in-depth technical design begins. Use early prototypes to test your assumptions and make any necessary changes before it becomes too expensive or impractical.
At StudioRed, we use rapid-prototyping materials such as foam, foam core, cardboard, and paper to expedite early prototype development and testing, allowing us to move through the prototyping phase quickly.
Stage 3: Engineering and Manufacturing Validation
As the design matures in the hardware development lifecycle, you’ll start developing higher-fidelity prototypes, such as working models and functional prototypes. As you grow closer to your production model, coordination between design and engineering becomes increasingly important. Here’s how it typically breaks down:
- Engineers conduct engineering validation tests (EVTs) to ensure the product is properly designed for manufacturing, accounting for factors such as part design, part count, material selection, standardization, electrical design, and modularity to make the fabrication and assembly process as efficient as possible.
- Designers provide input throughout the engineering process, ensuring the product isn’t changed too much. This may involve ensuring the design remains human-centered so that manufacturing optimizations don’t detract from the user experience.
The end goal of the hardware design process is to reach a fully machined prototype, with optimized industrial design and mechanical functionality. This is what you’ll use to conduct final tests and quality checks before moving on to mass production.
Stage 4: Quality Control and Regulatory Compliance
Once you’ve developed your final prototype, finalize a bill of materials and send out requests for quotes (RFQs) for manufacturing partners. Pick the manufacturer that can meet all of your requirements while keeping costs to a minimum, then set up an initial production run.
The initial production run is one of the most important parts of the hardware product development process, as it’s the last chance to make changes before moving into mass production. Here are two tests you’ll want to conduct in this stage:
- Design Validation Test (DVT): A design validation test ensures the manufacturer gets the design right with all intended functionality and performance requirements met before moving to mass production. This helps catch defects early, establish QA processes throughout the assembly line, and make any final changes before the final product is set in stone.
- Production Validation Test (PVT): Following your DVT, the manufacturer uses your final product to conduct a production validation test. This is intended to optimize production speed, accuracy, and cost-efficiency without altering the final design. While this is usually handled in-house by the manufacturer, they should fully communicate their testing process and specific steps to you.
Keep in mind that getting the design fully production-ready takes time, often requiring many rounds of feedback before you get the finish you want. And for highly regulated product categories, such as medtech and fintech, you’ll need to ensure the final product is fully compliant and able to obtain all required certifications.
Stage 5: Mass Production and Launch
Once the design process and initial production run are complete, you’re ready to move the product into mass production. At this stage, the critical task is setting up logistics processes, including packaging, warehousing procedures, and distribution methods, so you can store all your production units and prepare to deliver them to your customers.
By this point, you’re deep into the project management lifecycle, and your project management team should be coordinating across stakeholders to finalize everything ahead of launch. For example, marketing and sales strategies should be fully prepared, customer support managers should train staff agents on the new product, and web landing pages should be ready to go.
When everything is ready, you can launch the product and start distributing it to customers.
Stage 6: Post-Launch Refinement
The hardware product development process doesn’t end once the product is launched. Your team should track KPIs and performance metrics, from conversion rates to overall social media sentiment.
| Post-Launch KPIs for Hardware Products | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Metric | What It Measures | Red Flag | Action Steps |
| Defect rate | Manufacturing quality | >3% failing at QC | Audit the factory, check for drift from specifications |
| Unit margin | Overall profitability | Shrinking margin | Take steps to lower COGs, e.g., negotiating parts |
| Return rate | Reliability and market fit | >5% returns in 90 days | Understand why users return it, review, and refine UX factors |
| Review scores | Customer satisfaction | <4 out of 5 stars | Assess critical reviews, update and iterate |
| Conversion rate | Sales vs. traffic | Low sales despite high traffic | Re-evaluate marketing materials, sales funnel, pricing |
All of these metrics, data points, and customer thoughts can be used to iterate on the current product or inform decisions about the next product you’re developing.
Design and Engineer Your Hardware with StudioRed
Bringing a product from an idea to mass production is highly complex, requiring cross-functional expertise and intensive effort. However, you don’t have to handle the entire hardware product development process on your own.
You can partner with a full-service product design agency like StudioRed to outsource the highly technical aspects of product design, including industrial design, mechanical engineering, and prototype development. You dictate the direction, and our team will make it a reality, leveraging over 40 years of experience across industries to set you up for success.
Contact us today to learn more about our services and how we can help you design your next hardware product idea.
