A product development company is a firm that you can hire to assist in creating, building, testing, and refining a product or service. Product development companies often feature varied skills and capabilities, ranging from product definition to manufacturing.
These companies are brought in to lead or assist in the development of new products, but they can also be hired to refine or identify a problem with an existing product.
It can be especially useful to hire an experienced product development team if you work within a complex and highly-regulated environment, such as the medical device and life sciences industries.
Let’s dive into the key reasons why you might consider hiring a product development company.
From technical difficulties to overwhelmed internal teams, there are a number of reasons why product development companies like Goddard are called in to help.
Hiring experienced, reliable, full-time engineers can be really expensive. And if you’re a small startup with a tight budget, it may not make financial sense to hire a full-time team. This is where a product development company with the relevant experience can make all the difference.
A skilled product development company can provide technical expertise and support, while also ensuring that your startup dollars aren’t wasted on inefficient development practices.
Sometimes all you need to solve a challenging problem is to pass it off to a fresh set of experienced eyes. If you are stuck in the development process thanks to a technical issue, you can hire a product development company to evaluate it and recommend a path forward.
Goddard is often called in to help assess and refine a product that is hard to use or is experiencing failures in the field. If your product is failing unexpectedly (or even unintentionally causing harm), it may be time to reach out to a product development team who can help you get to the bottom of the problem.
Maybe you already have a full-time team of engineers – but when those resources are overwhelmed and your internal priorities shift, it’s easy for projects to linger and fall behind. A product development company can help to relieve your internal team’s bandwidth.
Engineers don’t typically manage detailed regulations, but product development companies are able to bridge the gap between R&D and achieving FDA regulations and other compliance requirements.
A crucial mistake that many product developers make is developing products all the way to the trial stage, then moving to satisfy regulatory requirements. At this point, significant changes to the product’s design will be needed to meet regulations, leading to added costs and delays to the product’s launch schedule.
A good product development company applies regulations early on in the product development process. This helps to ensure a safe and effective product to better meet user needs.
Learn More About Medical Device Regulations
There are lots of experienced, skilled product developers on the market. Here are a few tips to help you select the right partner for your engineering needs.
Whether you’re looking to break into a new market or you’re an established brand with a technical challenge, it’s useful to seek out a product development firm with relevant prior experience.
A product development firm with relevant industry experience provides a holistic approach to engineering work, ensuring technical precision and marketability.
A thoughtful product development process should include engineers and designers. This will help ensure that your product is useful, functional, and marketable. A sleek design will not help a product to sell if it impedes usability or it cannot be manufactured.
At Goddard, our engineering and design teams work in tandem, helping to assure our clients that we bring technical precision and elegant industrial design to every project.
It’s critical that your product development partner is thinking about the long-term consequences of their design choices: is this product designed for manufacturability? The transition to manufacturing is often one of the most challenging aspects of development – be sure to choose a partner who thinks about this step from the start.
All successful product development efforts are rooted in the needs of the product’s user. When you’re picking a product development company, make sure to evaluate their human factors engineering capabilities. It’s essential that your product development partner consider your product’s key stakeholders as they build, test, and refine.
Before you select a product development company, evaluate whether you need an on-site team or not. Some product development companies will send their engineers to work on-site with your team and some prefer to complete the work at their own facilities.
At Goddard, we love to work on-site with our client’s team but are also open to hosting your projects at our own offices in Boston and San Diego.
So you’ve selected a product development partner – great! Here are a few tips on what you may need in order to get things started.
To keep your product development project moving smoothly, it’s important to gather any relevant documents such as user and market research, product requirements, or prior testing data.
Communication is the name of the game. It’s critical that you clearly communicate your goals, timelines, and responsibilities with your chosen product development partner. An experienced product development company will create an environment that welcomes clear communication and openness between teams.
If you’re at the very start of your product development effort, an engineering partner can help you get started with your Phase Zero work. It’s helpful to be ready to answer a few key questions:
Learn More – Phase Zero: The First and Most Important Step in a Product Development Plan
Make sure you thoroughly review the firm’s product development process and philosophies before getting started. This will help ensure that your expectations are aligned with every phase of the product development effort.
Goddard’s team of experienced, reliable engineers can help guide you through the product development process or plug into existing projects as needed.
If you’re looking for a skillful product development partner to help get your next project started, check out some of our Featured Projects and dive into our Our Process to learn more about how we approach product development.
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