Our Process.
Bringing a new product from an idea to market not only requires many years of experience, but also the ability to be agile and adaptable. These traits also require practice and vigilance to improve project speed and efficiency. Every product has its own unique challenges and team members must be comfortable wearing many different hats.
Many engineers prefer to stay in their own lane and execute what they know. This can inevitably lead to them perceiving challenges through old lenses. We instead seek engineers that prefer to work on diverse teams and on projects that require creative, trans-disciplinary solutions.
At Mass PD, we understand the importance of the client’s experience and do not tell them how to view the trends in the industry they know the most about. We leverage their experience and augment their insights with supplemental, innovative approaches.
To check out the amazing products we developed and clients we’ve worked alongside (that helped launch incredible businesses) please visit our "work" page.
Technology Scouting.
Before making any prototypes, we will make sure that we can identify a product architecture that will be cost effective in production. We validate the proposed approach with quick fast-fail prototypes that demonstrate that the concepts and technologies are not-only viable, but also can be packaged in a product as intended. During this stage we will provide:
System architecture schematic
Production COGs ball-park estimate
Fast-fail validation
Roadmap of prototype development
Prototyping.
Prototypes demonstrate a product's functionality and inform the industrial designers of key product criteria to design around. Progressing without these parameters risks designing an infeasible or cost-prohibitive product. Our new, in-house rapid prototyping technologies and proven methodology expedite this prototyping process while maximizing the learnings from each iteration. In this stage, we test and evaluate the prototype to determine these parameters for the industrial designers:
Key components and their placement
Required volume and weight
Part material and quality
Design for Manufacturing.
With the more creative tasks completed, this phase focuses on the objective of onboarding the manufacturer. We engineer the internals of the files provided by the industrial designers to maximize quality and reduce cost while maintaining the aesthetic. We then build a "works-like looks-like" prototype to validate the final files and support the hand-off to the manufacturers by providing:
Quotation package with drawings
Supplier introductions (US + abroad)
Advice on supplier selection
Guidance on tooling strategy
Assistance with off-tool debugging