20 Questions of Product Development

“The fundamental goal of product development is to evolve the product from an abstract idea to a specific manufacturable design.”

Imagine a product development effort to design a flashlight. At the beginning of the process the concept of the flashlight is abstract. We don’t know if it is a metal flashlight or a plastic one or if it runs on a D-Cell battery flashlight or a rechargeable one. While designing a flashlight, literally hundreds of decisions need to be made to evolve the abstract idea to a specific manufacturable design of the flashlight.

To ensure the evolution is progressing desirably, design decisions are frequently checked and challenged. Check-and-challenge meetings called design reviews are often held for this purpose. Over the course of a product development effort, the following 20 questions are likely to be asked in various design reviews. Even if they are not, the team needs good answers for each of these questions in order to reach the goal of having a specific manufacturable design.

Level I Questions: Investors typically want to know answers to these

1 . What is the basic product idea?

2 . What makes the product unique?

3 . Who uses the product, and how do they use it?

4 . Who buys the product, and how do they buy it?

5 . What pain does the product solve?

Level II Questions: Project managers typically want to know answers to these

6 . What does the product need to be able to do (functionally)?

7 . How well does it need to do it?

8 . How will we know if it does it?

Level III Questions: Engineers and manufacturers typically want to know answers to these

9 . What is the basic product concept and its fundamental working principle(s)?

10 . What are the product’s subsystems/components?

11 . How do these subsystems/components interface with each other?

12 . Who are the key partners/vendors in acquiring/making these subsystems/components?

13 . For every component:

• What is its shape (geometry)?

• What is it made of (material)?

• How is it made (processing)?

14 . What is the most critical subsystem/component?

15 . What is the most critical interface between subsystems/components?

Level IV Questions: Product sustainers typically want to know answers to these

16 . How will the product be packaged?

17 . What needs to be checked before shipping each unit?

18 . What needs to be checked while the product is in use?

19 . How will the product be fixed when it stops working?

20 . How will the product be discarded after its life?

What do we do with this to make it useful?

The name of the game in product development and design is iteration. If you want these questions to be useful for you, you will benefit from thinking about them from an iterative point-of-view. What this means is that you’ll take a first-stab at trying to answer these, then you’ll refine your understanding and answer them again. And again until they are all answered sufficiently.

The 20 questions themselves can be a roadmap (of sorts) to product development. Imagine that after your first attempt to answer them, you have good answers to questions 1, 2, and 5; but you are really not sure about questions 3 and 4. Simply seeing where you have answers and where you don’t helps you see where you should allocate product development resources to improve your understanding and make specific design decisions.

Another part of using these questions is to be okay with not knowing the answers to them early in the product development process. To be useful, these questions need to be continuously considered. The figure below helps to illustrate this.

Levels I-IV questions are shown stacked in the vertical direction of the figure, while the notion of evolving a product from an abstract definition to a specific definition is shown as a left-to-right transition. Time progresses from left to right in this image.

At the beginning of the product development process we start (not finish) answering Level I questions. After we have some answers – that frankly we know are not fully correct yet – we start answering Level II questions. While answering Level II questions, we continue to think about and refine our answers for Level I questions – as inspired by the understanding gained when answering Level II questions. In this way, we consider the questions iteratively.

Importantly, time is progressing from left to right, NOT top to bottom. If it were from top to bottom, it would imply that we finish Level I then we go to II, then finish II and go to III and so on. This kind of premature optimization (to try to finish) sinks product development teams. INSTEAD, be okay with preliminary answers to Level 1 questions, while you work through Level 2 questions, and so on. The diagonal orange line in the figure indicates that here we are okay with failure (lack of understanding or bad decision making), but as time progresses we want to arrive at the dashed orange line, which indicates that we now have good understanding and tend not to be making bad design decisions.

Are these questions really that important?

I believe they are essential. Let me put it this way: If during the product development process you are NOT continuously seeking to answer these questions, I’m not sure you’re working on product development at all.