The trouble with most engineers is that they don’t know when to stop. It’s been my experience that if you ask a typical engineer to design a product, let’s say a cell phone, he doesn’t just stop when he has the basic design finished. If you give him free rein to “do his thing” you will wind up with a phone that takes pictures, plays 15 games, is a calculator, a scheduler, a voice recorder, an alarm clock and checks your tire pressure, traces your family history, trims your toenails and opens beer cans - and includes an instruction manual that has 139 pages where the instructions on how to make a phone call is on page 117.
My philosophy of product design is to start with a basic design that I can produce and sell for an affordable price and which does the job - and only the job - for which it is intended. Later, depending on customer feed-back - and I can’t over-emphasize how important it is to listen to your customers - I will introduce an improved or “heavy duty” model. Of course these later variations will cost more and I will probably sell less of them but they will satisfy a more specialized need than our basic model. And while I’m at it, I will make sure that the heavy duty model uses as many components of the basic model as is practical.
Another reason for developing the “new and improved” model is that it frequently allows me to make a sale which I would have otherwise lost. And continuing to expand my product line gains me the reputation as the company that “has all the answers” and “has any product” that you want. This sort of reputation inevitably brings more business. There is still one other reason for expanding our line and it has to do with web site dynamics. The more products that you show on your site, especially if the names are similar or related, the higher (better) positioning you will achieve with the search engines that find you when people do a web search.
To illustrate, let’s assume I want to develop a coat hanger. I would probably start out with a very basic formed wire model that you get from every dry cleaner. I will make whatever tooling is necessary. Later, one of my biggest customers will come to me asking for a model that has a paper sleeve over it that can be imprinted with his advertising message. No problem. I will add whatever tooling is necessary to fabricate and apply the paper sleeve. I will probably even offer to do the printing on the sleeve.
A few months later another customer will request a plastic hanger instead of the common wire basic model. Again, no problem. We will add another production line, some new tooling, perhaps use a few components from the basic model and suddenly we have a new product to add to our line of coat hangers.
And then we may start to have some problems. Some of our customers begin to complain that the plastic hangers break too easily. So we get busy and re-engineer our design to come up with a “heavy duty, deluxe” model which costs more but holds more clothes and lasts five time as long. And we continue to produce the original plastic design because many of our customers understand and expect a certain limited life from our much less expensive original model.
This philosophy will work whether you are producing a product or offering a service. And it is especially important if you are starting a new business. Design and build a basic product (or service) and start selling it. The priority is to get your business off the ground; later you will introduce more and better products and services.
There is one situation where you may want to ignore my advice regarding offering just the basic product or service. When you are starting a business you will want to be in some way better, improved or faster than your competition. So when you are starting out, if you can offer the slightly better product or service that will give you an “edge” over the existing competition that is the time to do it. Be creative, there is always a way to improve on an existing product or service.
By the way, does anyone know where I can buy a cell phone that just makes phone calls?
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