5 Tips to Successfully Outsource Your Product Development

by Emma L. Business consultant

There are so many reasons for you to outsource your product development. First of all, you get a higher quality of the product due to the fact that you get to tap into the multidisciplinary expertise of all the parties you collaborate with. Second, you get to capitalize on technology forecasting, manage the project timeline and control project costs much better.

Finally, due to the fact that each of the teams on this project gets to do the part that they’re highly specialized in, you get to reduce time to market. Lastly, you maintain confidentiality, especially in scenarios where you’re outsourcing a part of work per agency. Still, pulling off all of this is in no way a simple thing. Here are several tips that can help you manage all of this.

Outsource your Product Development

Look for specialized engineers

The first privilege you get when it comes to outsourcing your product development is the ability to choose a plethora of teams and individuals to perform each of the tasks involved in the manufacturing process of your product. This is especially the case when it comes to complex products like electronics. Here, you may need a circuit design engineer, someone to create a layout, mechanical engineer to tend to the moving parts and more. Sure, this makes the production process substantially more complex, however, it also makes your job of managing it all substantially easier.

Work with several parties

The main reason why working with several parties is so important is due to the fact that you’re not relying on a single contractor. This is especially great when hiring freelancers which are, on average, quite unreliable. Keep in mind that it’s substantially easier to replace an engineer who is a part of a team than to replace someone who’s performing the entire work from scratch. Also, replacing 100 percent of your work capacity means starting the work from scratch, seeing as how the replacement may have a different idea on how to proceed with all of this. Therefore, working with more parties ensures greater reliability of the project.

Think past development and manufacturing

Even though outsourcing development and manufacturing makes your job easier in so many different areas, your work doesn’t end here. Once products are set and done, you need to look for other services to collaborate with, as well. The first task to handle is finding reliable transport and warehouse management systems. This, alongside with development and manufacturing will pose as a core of your company’s logistics. In some cases, collaborating with agencies like CartonCloud can provide you with a compromise solution by giving you software to handle your warehouse and delivery systems. In this way, you get to make a system that allows you to partially outsource the entire process, while still handling some tasks in-house.

Development and Manufacturing

Manage the product cost of development

Having a single person design and develop your product is usually not cost-effective, due to the fact that the person you’re hiring controls the total cost. You see, each of the necessary tasks has its own price range and it’s logical to expect that the person in question will charge each of these tasks by the highest rate. When looking for a person for each task, you get the privilege of negotiating the cost specifically for the task, which is much simpler and gives you more leverage. Finding someone for one aspect of product development is simpler than finding someone who can perform the entirety of work on their own. This makes this entire scenario slightly more in your favor.

Be as specific as possible

Just because you have someone else developing it, it doesn’t mean that this is no longer your product. Therefore, what you need to do is make a detailed description of what you want the end result to be like. Now, the first pitfall that most entrepreneurs fall into is having unreasonable expectations, especially for the team they’re hiring and the money that they’re investing.

Other than this, you need to abandon the presumption that other people have the ability to read your mind, which is why you need to be specific even in the areas that seem transparent or self-explanatory. What’s logical to you may not be so for someone else and you need to use this mindset as a starting point. One more thing that is particularly important is the fact that you shouldn’t only communicate your desires but also your “don’t wants”. As funny as this may sound, it might give the engineer/designer you’ve hired a much better idea of what you really want.

Conclusion

As you can see, like in any other collaboration, there are two factors that matter the most – expectations and communication. Setting unrealistic expectations is the first step towards a major disappointment, regardless of what you’re doing. As for the communication, the end result of a project that you leave to someone else is never going to be exactly how you envisioned. How close it can get depends on your ability to share your piece of mind.