Prototype to Product Quotes

“form follows function,”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“wonderful product, coherent but unique, and forged from the skill and creativity of each”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“Great team members don’t automatically turn into an effective team;”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“Project planning (determining the who, what, where, when, and cost of what needs to get done)”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“the amount of communications (and opportunities to mess it up) tends to rise exponentially with the number of people in an effort.”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“This is particularly true for hardware, where creating revisions of circuits and mechanical components can take weeks or months. Sweating the details up front of what we’re trying to accomplish can easily avoid an extra round of revisions, shaving months and serious dollars from the project.”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“for each hour we spend on requirements planning, we’ll save multiple hours on implementation.”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“In my experience, the lack of solid requirements is the biggest source of confusion, disputes, and overruns in product development. Gaining agreement on the details of what we’re creating is critical to ensuring that everyone’s working toward a shared goal.”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“number of software packages exist for managing the requirements process. Examples include IBM Rational DOORS, IBM Rational RequisitePro, Borland Caliber, PTC Integrity, Enterprise Architect, and Parasoft Concerto.”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“Serviceability. Can the device be serviced if something fails, or should it be replaced? If serviceable, which parts should be serviceable? Does it need periodic maintenance?”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“many requirements are really about getting everyone on the same page.”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“buy rather than make whenever it’s reasonable. Doing things from scratch is inevitably way more difficult than we think it will be and it’s usually more important to get a product out the door in order to get market feedback than to spend time reducing cost the first time around. If the market likes our product, we’ll be able to redesign for reduced cost and incorporate market feedback.”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“Product development is largely an exercise in risk management, and more complex equals more risk.”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“recommend going with whatever’s simplest among the options that are likely to get the job done.”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“Unless we know that volumes will be much higher than 10k units, one good strategy is to start off by using a SOM and then do a cost-reduction redesign using the same parts as the SOM when volumes warrant the effort.”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“One issue to consider when integrating PC-class parts is continued availability. Consumer-oriented parts might only be on the market for a few months and numerous tweaks might occur during that time, such as component changes.”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“The power used by the processor ends up as heat.”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“manufacturing testing. This is performed, usually on each unit, to ensure that units have been produced properly.”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“engineering testing or bench testing, is performed prior to a product moving into manufacturing. It ensures that our product is designed properly.”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“there’s a famous saying that “the map is not the territory.” Likewise, CAD models aren’t physical parts that we can hold in our hands.”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“Have assembly steps be optimally quick and reproducible (i.e., goof-proof).”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“There are three basic goals in DFA: Reduce the number of parts needed to assemble each unit. Reduce the number of different part types used; e.g., trying to use a single screw size and length throughout an enclosure.”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“It’s fundamentally an iterative process of thinking up different ways to create a part, trying different materials, processes, and design options to come up with the best parts and strategies for manufacturing them.”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“real parts have real costs and imperfect behaviors. DFM’s goal is to design “real-world” parts that can be manufactured using existing processes at minimum cost.”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“different but related endeavors that both seek to maximize mechanical quality and reliability while minimizing cost, although the terms are sometimes used interchangeably. DFM addresses the creation of parts, while DFA addresses the assembly of those parts.”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“I see that you’re planning on having a metal part fabricated to hold that mechanism together, but if you switch to glass-filled plastic for the enclosure you might get the stiffness and tolerances you’re looking for without the need for a separate metal piece, and you’ll save a bundle.”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“(blocks that abstract complexity),”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“In the case of software, the fixed cost of an iteration is low, so getting feedback by “trying stuff, seeing what works and what doesn’t, then fixing it” is relatively inexpensive.”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“while designers/developers are mighty engines of continuous change—making changes is what we do for a living—factories are strongly biased towards stasis, keeping things the same.”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market

“development culture is all about nonstop creativity (basically contained chaos at times), manufacturing culture is all about process, precision, and repeatability.”
― Alan Cohen, Prototype to Product: A Practical Guide for Getting to Market