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In the last blog post, we discussed why Design for Excellence (DfX) is important to your business. Building on several important concepts, this blog will focus on the Product Development phase and discuss how incorporating Agile principles can improve and accelerate your hardware product development process.

Design for Excellence (DfX) is a holistic approach to designing a hardware product that takes into account how the product is made at scale. In addition to understanding your manufacturing plan and target costs, there are six categories to consider: assembly, cost, manufacturing, test, service, and supply chain.

Mapping good ideas to product development is best done in the concurrent engineering framework, a collaborative approach to new product introduction. Using the MVP and the product roadmap, you are now ready to move into balancing design concepts with business concerns like costs.

Marketing — understanding your customer and their needs — and market analysis play a crucial role in an efficient product realization process. Jay Feldis tells us how as part of PRG's Ask the Expert series.

In the next chapter in our series on taking a hardware product from idea to scale, we move into the Design & Planning stage. Minimal Viable Products (MVP) and roadmaps will help you identify the key features for your new product.

Proactively address compliance failure to keep your product on track. Howard Edelman explains how as part of PRG's Ask the Expert series.

The feasibility phase addresses two questions. First, can your design be made into a manufacturable product? And, second, how will you sell your product and to whom? Validating the feasibility of manufacturing a new product is the next chapter in our series by Mike Freier on how to take a new hardware product from idea to scale.

As part of PRG’s Ask the Expert series, David Graham and Allen Adolph explain the benefits of using stage gates or a formal process that breaks up large projects into smaller stages or phases. As products progress from prototyping to manufacturing, stage gates allow teams to make effective decisions at critical junctures.

The Concept & Feasibility Phase is the key to understanding if your idea can gain market traction, how much profit your idea can potentially make, and how to position it to stay ahead of the competition.

As part of PRG's Ask the Expert series, Michael Keer answers how to overcome the specifics of this challenge for medical devices which we see in many companies.

Mike Freier, a PRG Partner, authored a series of blogs about how hardware products transition from an idea, through development, manufacturing and volume sales to their eventual end of life. Join us on this journey and learn how to avoid the pitfalls and risks that companies encounter on their way to a successful product launch.

As we begin 2023 there is still a lot of uncertainty about what this new year will bring to businesses. With multiple layoffs in the tech industry continuing to cause concerns for product development, this blog showed multiple ways to remain competitive – this final part summarizes all the recommendations given previously.