Saturn Solutions Ltd

Initial Steps

In any product design, the first steps are to explore a market for your product and a need that it will fulfill in that market. You should then identify existing (competing) products and find a position alongside these for your new product.

Specification

Having explored the market place you will need to create a specification for your product. This will essentially contain your instructions to the designer outling the elements that the new product should possess. A specification starts out as a list of ideas and requirements that describe a device or project. This gets trimmed down to something more exact and explicit over time. It will help the designer if you give your reasons for wanting the product to perform certain tasks and how you would expect the tasks to be performed. You should also list which elements are 'required' and which are 'desired' as it will sometimes be necessary (for any number of reasons / constraints) to make changes during the design phase. These lists, which should be kept separate from the main specification, will help the designer to have a clearer understanding of your requirements.

So the specification goes through two phases. In the first phase it describes the product as desired and, in the second phase it describes the product as required. The product specification, with your designers input, describes the product as it will be produced.