Scope your product. Map the engineering. Build the path to manufacturing. Scoping is the first stage of our product development services for complex B2B systems. Up to $25,000 credited toward your first project.
Customers and Partners we’ve worked with
The Problem
You have a product that needs serious engineering depth, and your team doesn’t have the time, the bandwidth, or the multi-discipline coverage to scope it properly.
You don’t have the time to scope it. You don’t have the team to execute it. And the longer it sits without a clear engineering plan, the longer your product stays off the market. Every engagement starts with scoping.
What Scoping Looks Like at DEVELOP
When you engage DEVELOP for scoping, you’re test-driving a product development department. Scoping is often described as product development consulting, but the goal here is defining a product and manufacturing path that can be built.
We don’t just analyze the product. We analyze your business and your customers as well. We need to understand all three to find the convergence of value: where your product’s function, your business objectives, and your customer’s needs all align. That’s where the highest-margin opportunities live.
Scoping is how we focus the engineering energy. It defines the direction of the full product development process before design begins. We’re setting the direction so the team is headed the right way, with enough flexibility to find the best solution. Scoping typically takes approximately three months. Your scoping investment is credited toward your first project, up to $25,000.
What Scoping Covers
Our scoping zeroes in on the variables that separate products that ship from those that stall.
What does the product need to do? How does it need to perform? What constraints does it operate within? If the product has mechanical, electrical, and software components, we map the convergence points where those disciplines intersect, because that’s where most development risk lives.
We need to understand your business because the goal isn’t just to design a product. The goal is to maximize your margins and create the highest-value solution for your customers. What are your margins today? Where is your business headed? What does your product roadmap look like over the next several years? CapEx for product development isn’t a one-year decision. Understanding where your business is going shapes everything we scope.
If you have multiple product opportunities, scoping is where we build out the portfolio and determine which product to tackle first. We help you identify target markets, validate conviction around the opportunity, and plan the sequence so each product builds on the last. We sequence them so each product builds on the last.
Who uses this product? How do they use it? What are they willing to pay for, and what creates the most value in their operation? We need to understand your customer because that’s how we find the convergence point between what the product does, what the market values, and what creates the highest margins for your business. Every design decision should be informed by this.
We evaluate whether the approach is technically viable before committing to a design direction. Component selection, preliminary BOM development, and architecture decisions that shape the entire development process.
We analyze how the product will be manufactured at the highest value. This includes DFM/DFA considerations, material selection, tooling requirements, and assembly sequence planning. We need to determine target production volumes and ramp schedule because that drives tooling investment and manufacturing approach. If the product is headed for automated production, we factor that into the design architecture from the start.
We develop a cost model that accounts for development investment, prototyping costs, tooling, BOM cost at target volumes, and manufacturing cost per unit. Leadership gets the numbers they need to make capital decisions with confidence.
We identify the highest-risk elements: technology risk, supply chain risk, regulatory risk, and timeline risk. Each risk is documented with a mitigation strategy.
If the product requires certification (FCC, CE, UL, RoHS, ISO, or industry-specific standards), we map those requirements during scoping so they’re designed in from the start, not retrofitted later.
Two Ways to Engage
Scoping defines the direction. From there, work typically continues in one of two ways.
What You Get
At the end of scoping, you leave with:
Typical Product Development Timelines
For context on the full development path beyond scoping:
Working with a single team that handles all disciplines under one roof compresses timelines because there’s no coordination delay between separate firms. If the product moves toward automated production, the same team can design and build the systems that manufacture it.
The Five-Stage Journey
This is the full development path that follows once the work moves forward.
Understand your product, your market, your manufacturing path. This is where Scoping lives.
Build functional prototypes in-house. 3D printing, CNC, PCB fabrication.
Production-ready CAD, PCB layouts, firmware, BOM finalization. DFM/DFA.
Production-representative testing. EVT (Engineering Validation Testing), DVT (Design Validation Testing), PVT (Production Validation Testing). Manufacturing documentation.
Move into manufacturing. Or, transfer to DEVELOP’s automation team to design and build the production equipment.
FAQs
Frequently Asked Questions
These are the questions we get from teams evaluating product development at the point where decisions need to be made. They focus on scope, cost, timelines, and what you walk away with.
Approximately three months. That includes requirements definition, technical feasibility analysis, manufacturing path assessment, cost modeling, and risk identification.
Product development engagements start at $30K. Scope and investment depend on the complexity of the product and the number of disciplines involved. We define the investment during scoping. Your scoping investment is credited toward the project, up to $25,000.
Scoping is project-specific: we analyze one product and deliver a scope you can act on. Extension of Team provides ongoing engineering capacity for companies with active product roadmaps.. Dedicated engineering capacity for companies with multiple products in the pipeline.
We design for certification from the start. FCC, CE, UL, RoHS, and industry-specific standards. We design the product and prepare documentation so certification goes smoothly with third-party labs.
A prototype proves the concept works. A production-ready product has been through EVT, DVT, PVT, DFM optimization, BOM finalization, manufacturing documentation, and test protocol development. We plan for the full path from the start.
Yes. That’s the full circle. Same engineers who develop the product design and build the machines that manufacture it.
No. Some clients are manufacturers. Others are high-growth companies building their first manufacturing operation.