If I could know only one thing about your product and had to guess whether it ever reaches the market, I'd ask how complex it is.
I've watched hundreds of products up close, and complexity is the most reliable predictor I've seen of cost and timeline. It also predicts whether a product ever launches.
That's because complexity multiplies rather than adds.
Every feature you add has to work alongside every feature already there.
Each one brings firmware states to handle and failure modes to chase, and often more certification to pay for.
And some choices drag a whole chain of other choices behind them.
None of them feel like big decisions when you make them, but they are.
My own product was about as simple as it gets, a nickel-sized pop-up LED light. It still took longer and cost more than I ever imagined.
Your product is almost certainly more complex than that, so plan accordingly.
Highly complex products demand a bigger engineering team and more funding than most founders can put together.
Something like a new smartphone is best left to the companies that already have large teams and deep pockets.
Cost and time aren't even the worst of it.
Complexity also hurts your odds of market success.
A complex first version delays the day a real customer holds your product. Until that day, every feature you've built is still a guess.
So the longer you develop, the more guesses you stack on top of each other, and the more expensive it becomes to be wrong about any of them.
A better approach is to build the simplest version that fully solves the core problem, because every feature you leave out is one less guess you have to pay for.
One of the most expensive types of complexity is the kind that forces custom design on you before you've talked to a single customer.
Can you build a works-like, looks-like prototype from off-the-shelf dev kits and boards inside a 3D printed enclosure?
If you can, your complexity and your risk both drop a lot. A product can do quite a bit and still pass that test, as long as everything fits in the package you want.
Get that prototype in front of real customers before you spend big money on custom design, or lock yourself into a design you can't easily change.
Build the full "final" version first and you risk perfecting the wrong product.
So be honest with yourself. How complex is your product, really?
To help you put a number on it, I built a free Product Complexity Rating Tool. Answer a few questions and it scores your complexity, then shows you what's driving it.
Get your product complexity score
Talk soon,
John Teel
Predictable Designs
P.S. If you'd like help simplifying your product so it makes it to market, that's exactly what we do inside my Hardware Academy.
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