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The ClimateTech Hardware Production Stage

The production stage of the hardware product development cycle is an exciting one: you are finally manufacturing your product at scale so that it can be enjoyed by your customers. For climatetech innovators, the reward is amplified by the positive impact that your product will make on the planet.

In order to begin producing your climatetech hardware at scale, you must complete the following prototype levels first, as outlined in the Prototype Stage article:

• Pre-Alpha / MVP / Proof-of-Concept Prototype (used for testing your product concept)
• Alpha Prototype (used for internal tests)
• Beta Prototype (used for customer tests)
• Pilot Prototype (used for testing manufacturing processes)

Manufacturing Readiness Level (MRL) Assessment

The US Department of Defense (DOD) has developed a rigorous and comprehensive assessment of Manufacturing Readiness Level (MRL) in 22 different areas (sub-threads) of product and business development. The DOD’s MRL framework is so valuable that Scale For ClimateTech has adopted it as a guide to help our hardware companies advance their manufacturing readiness. Our program can guide you through the DOD’s MRL assessment process step-by-step, or you may complete an MRL assessment on your own. It will give you a complete picture of the work needed to be done before your product can be truly manufacturing-ready. For more information on the MRL process and to complete an MRL self-assessment, visit dodmrl.com.

Our 10-minute Product Stage Assessment can also approximate your MRL, and it works well as a stepping stone to the full DOD MRL assessment. If your product requires electronics manufacturing, we also recommend completing our separate Electronics Manufacturing Readiness Assessment.

Working with Suppliers

Suppliers (aka. vendors) are entities that provide finished products, parts, or materials. Manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers are all suppliers. For more information on finding the right suppliers for your product, we recommend reading this article from Shopify.

Establishing a robust supply chain is one of the most important things that you can do to increase your chances of success as a hardware company. Some general guidelines for lowering your supply chain risks include:

1. Source your materials from more than one supplier (aka. multisourcing) to decrease your dependence on any single link in your supply chain
2. Identify your critical supply chain partners, including any suppliers of single-sourced materials
3. Consider anything and everything that could go wrong in your supply chain (eg. material shortages, inclement weather, economic downturns, etc.), prioritize the risks based on likelihood, and document a plan for each risk scenario
4. Maintain an extra stock of key supplies to provide a buffer in case of a shortage, etc.
5. Communicate regularly with your supply chain partners to reduce unexpected risks
6. Vet potential supply chain partners ahead of time by consulting with references

Visit our resources page for checklists to help you prepare for supplier meetings and templates for a full Supply Chain Risk Assessment and Supplier Basic Performance Audit.

Our partners at Partsimony can also help you with supply chain management. (Tell them we sent you!)

Working with Manufacturers

As an early-stage company, you need to prepare yourself for the fact that some manufacturers will not be willing to work with companies of your size and stage. Some manufacturers work with large order quantities and Fortune 500 companies exclusively, whereas others recognize the potential value in working with startup companies. Scale For ClimateTech can make introductions to such founder-friendly manufacturers for you. It’s important to find manufacturing partners who are appropriate for your company’s stage.

Regardless of the manufacturer you approach, there is preparation that you can do in advance to increase your chances of working with that manufacturer and signing a deal. At a minimum, you should have the following prepared in advance of your meeting with the manufacturer:

• Bill of Materials (BOM)

  • A list of components for your product

• Bill of Process (BOP)

  • A sequential process for producing your product

• Engineering & Assembly Drawings

  • With tolerances & fit

For more information on these topics, read our guide on Engineering & Assembly Drawings, Bill of Process (BOP) & Bill of Materials (BOM).

We also have guides on Preparing for Manufacturer Pricing Discussions and Maximizing Manufacturing Tours, as well as a calculator for Rating Contract Manufacturers.

Workforce

Scaling up your production will also require you to scale up your workforce. To help you with this, we have created an Employee Handbook template for you to edit and distribute to new team members.

Low-Rate Production

In order to begin low-rate production, you must first verify your manufacturing processes on a pilot line. (For more information on pilot lines, see our Prototype Stage article.) Your product’s design should also be “frozen” at this point (ie. you have committed to the design and plan to change it as little as possible). Remember – any product design changes that take place from this point forward will be expensive!

At this point, your manufacturing processes and tooling should also be qualified (ie. confirmed to operate up to standard during sustained manufacturing). Once you have successfully demonstrated and stabilized your manufacturing processes in low-rate production, you may advance to full-rate production.

Full-Rate Production

By the time you reach full-rate production, your manufacturing processes should be stable and your low-rate production goals should have been achieved (eg. quality, cost, schedule, and performance goals).

Lean & Six Sigma Processes

Full-rate production is also the stage when you should begin to put Lean & Six Sigma Processes into place, if you haven’t already. For more on this topic, consult our guide on Lean Principles & Implementation and our Lean Kaizen Project Management template.

Summary

In the Idea Stage article, we covered the basics for ensuring that your climatetech hardware product idea will be viable in the marketplace. We then discussed the process of turning that idea into a functional product that your customers will love in the Prototype Stage article. Lastly, in this article we introduced the fundamental concepts involved in scaling your production from a handful of units to full production runs.

The key to achieving mass production of your product is that you (very likely) cannot do it on your own. Establishing a robust supply chain and long-term relationships with partners who are well-suited for the stage and size of your business will increase your chances of success.

If you’re a climatetech entrepreneur who would like to be introduced to the New York State hardware manufacturing ecosystem, Scale For ClimateTech would love to help you. Our free program can help connect you with contract manufacturers that are experienced in working with early-stage companies. If you’d like to stay in the loop about our future offerings and be the first to know when our annual application period opens, please subscribe to our newsletter.

Best of luck on your manufacturing journey!

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Taking ClimateTech Hardware from Prototype to Production

Prototyping is an essential process that every product must go through before it can be available on the market. If you’re developing prototypes for a new climatetech product, this guide can serve as a framework to help you advance it to the production stage. While there is no one “right” way to develop a prototype, we recommend following the steps outlined in this article in the order they’re listed.

Before you begin prototyping, you should make sure to complete the following steps, as described in the Idea Stage article:

• Identify a target customer with a specific problem that your product can solve
• Define your product’s value proposition
• Define the customer requirements for your product and translate these into technical specifications

If you have already begun prototyping but are unsure which prototype stage you are at, our Product Stage Assessment can estimate your product, prototype, and testing stage for you. It also provides you with a personal product roadmap tool to monitor your product development progress over time.

Introduction to Prototyping

Prototyping is the iterative process of building preliminary products or parts of products to test their design, functionality, usability, and satisfaction of customer requirements. Each prototype should be thought of as an experiment. Every time you build a prototype, you should have a clear hypothesis that you are testing, as you did during customer discovery. Building prototypes and putting them in the hands of your customers early and often is the best way to ensure that your end product will meet their expectations.

As you read through the typical progression of prototype levels outlined below, keep in mind that prototyping is not usually a linear process. The steps below represent the most direct path to production, but it’s very likely you will need to iterate on multiple prototypes at each step – or go back and repeat steps – and this is okay! It’s better to spend time testing multiple prototypes to make sure you are building something that your customers want to buy, rather than rushing an uncertain design to production.

Step 1: Pre-Alpha / MVP / Proof-of-Concept Prototype

The first hardware prototype that is typically built is called a Pre-Alpha Prototype, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), or a Proof-of-Concept Prototype. This early stage of prototype development may be referred to as the “research,” “benchtop,” or “lab” stage. In the Scale For ClimateTech program, we refer to prototypes at this stage as Pre-Engineering Prototypes (or Pre-EPs for short).

No matter which name you choose to describe it, prototypes built at this stage all have a common goal: testing and validating the core or “killer” assumptions of the hardware device. As the name “proof-of-concept” implies, you are testing the basic concept of your product. The name “Minimum Viable Product” is also apt because you are developing a prototype with the minimum features necessary to prove whether your product can provide value in the marketplace.

Testing Your Product Concept

You can test your product’s concept by:

• Creating engineering models and / or simulations, followed by:
• Building partial subsystems (a subsystem is a group of parts, and an entire product system is typically made up of multiple subsystems), followed by:
• Building full subsystems independently (eg. building an electronic assembly & outer casing separately and testing each on its own, before putting them together).

The results of these tests will help you decide whether to proceed to the next prototype stage, or to iterate and adjust your product concept.

Step 2: Alpha Prototype

If you have completed the steps above and have gathered initial evidence that your product concept can work and will provide value to your target customer, then you can proceed to the Alpha Prototype stage. Alpha prototypes are primarily used for internal testing, but they can still be shown to your customers to receive their feedback.

In the Scale For ClimateTech program, we refer to alpha prototypes as Engineering Prototypes (EPs).

Engineering Prototype

An Engineering Prototype is a single looks-like & works-like prototype resembling the full product. It should be an assembly of all your product’s systems. At this stage, your customer requirements should also be validated.

Customer Requirements Validation

Before proceeding with the prototype development process, it’s very important to validate that your product’s customer requirements are complete, consistent, and accurately aligned with your customer’s needs. This can be achieved by thoroughly reviewing the requirements for conflicts and testability, and also by talking to your customers and sharing your requirements with them to ensure you are on the same page. Making all the necessary changes to your customer requirements at this stage will help you avoid costly changes down the road. Here is more information on the process of customer requirements validation.

Step 3: Beta Prototype

Beta prototype units are typically used for external testing with customers (eg. demos, pilots, beta tests, etc.) as well as for regulatory and / or certification purposes. In the Scale For ClimateTech program, we break prototypes at the Beta stage into two categories: Engineering Validation Test Prototypes (EVTs), and later, Design Validation Test (DVT) prototypes.

Engineering Validation Test Prototype

An Engineering Validation Test Prototype is the first build of multiple units with production-quality tooling. As the name implies, the product’s engineering is tested at this phase to validate that it satisfies the product specifications including quality. It’s necessary to build and test multiple units at this stage in order to have a statistically significant sample size.

Design Validation Test Prototype

A DVT prototype looks-like & works-like the final saleable product. It is also fabricated using scale production processes such as injection molding, screen printing, casting, etc.

Step 4: Pilot Prototype

The purpose of a Pilot Prototype is to test the manufacturing processes for your product. At this stage, you have completed your first official production run at a relevant quantity (~5-10% of a full production run). In the Scale For ClimateTech program, we call pilot prototypes Production Validation Test (PVT) prototypes.

Production Validation Test Prototype

To be considered PVT Prototypes, your units must meet the previously-defined requirements to be saleable to customers. At this point, you should also have quality, packaging, and shipping processes in place.

Summary

The prototyping process can sometimes feel like a long and winding road with many iterations and pivots along the way, but remember that these changes are much less expensive to complete up front than after you have started manufacturing at scale. Each prototype brings a new learning opportunity, and you should try to learn as much from each one as you can while the cost of making changes to your product remains low.

Next Up: Low-rate and Full-rate Production

If you have completed all of the prototype stages above, validated that your product meets the customer requirements and technical specifications, and you have successfully tested your manufacturing processes, you are ready to begin low-rate production. We will discuss the production stage, including how to manage interactions with manufacturers and suppliers, in the next article.

Would you like help navigating the journey from prototype to production? If you’re a climatetech innovator, Scale For ClimateTech can provide expert guidance through this process.

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Home » Outline » Idea » Prototype » Production

Table of Contents:

Taking ClimateTech Hardware from Idea to Prototype

All great businesses and products start with an idea. If you have an idea for a new climatetech product, following this guide can help you advance it to the prototype level. While there is no one “right” way to develop a product, we recommend following the steps outlined in this article in the order they’re listed.

Step 1: Identify a Customer Segment with a Problem

Successful products create value for the customers who use them, and successful businesses capture this value as revenue. Products most often create value by solving a customer’s problem. The more serious or painful a problem is for a customer, the more they will value a solution to that problem.

When you are developing an idea for a product, it’s essential to define the problem first before you settle on the solution. In order to provide the best solution possible for your customers, you must first confirm the exact problem that they have, the severity of the problem, their willingness to pay for a solution to the problem, and the approximate number of customers who share the same problem.

This is accomplished through the process of customer discovery.

Customer Discovery & Product-Market Fit

Customer discovery is a scientific method that provides evidence to support product-market fit. Product-market fit is a measurement of how well a product satisfies a market demand. Customer discovery is a proven process that can help you identify a target customer segment and deliver the right product for their needs.

A customer segment is a group of customers with similar characteristics. Customers may be segmented based on any set of common traits such as their demographics, industry, geography, behavior, etc.

Similar to a scientific experiment, the customer discovery process begins with stating hypotheses – that is, educated guesses and assumptions – about the problems and pain points that a particular customer segment is experiencing. It is recommended that you do research and talk to subject matter experts to help you clearly define your hypotheses. Here are some of the assumptions that you will make at the beginning of the customer discovery process:

1. Customers in X segment have Y problem.
2. Customers in X segment are willing to pay for a solution to Y problem.
3. Your idea can solve Y problem with Z solution.
4. Customers in X segment are willing to pay for Z solution.

Once your hypotheses have been stated, you can begin to put them to the test. The best way to do this is to find potential customers from your defined X segment and conduct a customer discovery interview with them. The purpose of the interview is to find out if the customer actually has the Y problem that you assume they have, and if the problem is serious enough that they’re willing to pay for a product that will solve their problem (assumptions 1 and 2 from the list above).

After you have collected data on the customers’ problems and willingness to pay, you can then conduct a solution interview with the same customers. The purpose of this second interview is to test whether your proposed solution solves their problem in a satisfactory way, and if the customers would be willing to pay for a product based on your solution (assumptions 3 and 4 from the list above).

When conducting customer discovery and solution interviews, it helps to ask the customer open-ended (as opposed to simple yes/no) questions about things they have actually done. The goal is to get the customer to tell you a story based on their own experiences that will validate or disprove your hypotheses. If your hypotheses are proven to be incorrect, then change them based on what you have learned and begin the test again with your new hypotheses. This process should be repeated until you have gathered enough data to make you confident that your product idea solves a real problem for your selected customer segment.

For further guidance on planning and conducting customer discovery interviews, we recommend reading Talking to Humans by Giff Constable.

Customer Personas

Customer personas are a common way to summarize findings from the customer discovery process. A customer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your target customer segment that is based on data collected from your research. You should create one persona for each customer segment that you plan to target.

Customer personas are documents that your team should reference throughout the product development process. They can help guide your engineering and design decisions by reminding your team who you are designing your products for.

There is no single way to format a customer persona, but here are some traits that may be helpful to include:

• Demographics and Background (Age, career, location, etc.)
• Personality Characteristics
• Pains and Goals
• Motivators
• Expectations and Values

Customer personas also usually include a name and photograph that are representative of your customer segment, which help to remind your team that your customers are real people with real needs.

Step 2: Define Your Value Proposition

A Value Proposition explicitly states the actual value your product creates for your customer – or put in more blunt terms, why they should care about your product, and what it can do for them.

A Value Proposition statement for a product typically reads something like:

“_______[Product name] is a_______[brief product description]. Through its _______[feature(s)], it provides ______ [unique benefit(s)] to ______[target customer]”

Think carefully about your customer discovery findings and personas when filling in the blanks for your product’s Value Proposition. It may seem like a simple task, but these two sentences will ultimately guide the entire vision for your product. This vision will then be codified in a more complete form in a Market Requirements Document.

Step 3: Write a Market Requirements Document (MRD)

A Market Requirements Document (MRD) is an internal, confidential document that is essentially a detailed description of your product before it’s available. It is driven by your value proposition statement and the findings from your customer discovery, and it defines a common vision of the customer and market-focused product that can be shared with key stakeholders.

It should clearly define the following for your product:

1. Target Market
2. Buyers and User Profiles
3. Sales Channels
4. Challenges faced by the Current Market

Keep in mind that your MRD is meant to be a “living document” that is revised as your product evolves.

Step 4: Write a Product Requirements Document (PRD)

A Product Requirements Document (PRD) (also known as a Product Design Specification (PDS)) is a key document for communicating design intent to partners, stakeholders and all engineering development leaders. The purpose of a PRD is to translate the MRD into a technical vocabulary. It is developed cross functionally by the product designers and developers. Similar to MRDs, PRDs are internal, confidential documents.

If an MRD says “this is what we want,” then a PRD says ”this is how we can do it.”

Here is a non-comprehensive list of items to include in a PRD:

1. All Product Features Identified and Organized
2. Product Appearance, Weight and Size Identified
3. All System and Sub-System Interfaces Required (Inputs/Outputs, Formats, Power Requirements)
4. Product Certifications and Testing Required. (UL, FCC, CE, FCC, IP Rating, Energy Star, RoHS, Energy Star, etc.)
5. Product Packaging and Shipping Requirements
6. Product Repair, Service, Return, Warranty and Customer Support Strategy

Once the product requirements have been defined, you may conduct initial research on potential designs and manufacturing processes for your product. This research will inform the work performed during the later prototype and production stages.

PRDs should also enable developers to produce testing plans to monitor progress against targets in the various stages of prototype testing (eg. EVT, DVT, PVT), which we will cover in the next article.

Summary

It is critical to have a customer-centric mindset in the earliest stages of developing any product. You will increase your chances of success if you can validate that there is a sufficient market of customers available who have the problem that your product solves. This can be accomplished through the scientific process of customer discovery, and it will inform the engineering and design choices that you will make down the road. Customer discovery drives the formulation of a Market Requirements Document (MRD), which is then translated into a technical Product Requirements Document (PRD).

Next Up: Prototype Development

In the next article, we’ll cover the basics of the prototype development process.

Are you an entrepreneur with an early-stage innovation that addresses the climate crisis? Venture For ClimateTech is a venture studio + accelerator that provides hands-on support to help get your climatetech idea off the ground.

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