How To Design an Open Source Product

Assumptions: Heavyweight Product Management; test driven design; Extreme Manufacturing.

Rationale

Rationale: Extreme Manufacturing combines local production, reskilling and training, and ultimate efficiency of production both on labor cost and product design-for-manufacturing. The alternative is mass production.

Howto

• Define the need. Be as specific as possible on every single element of the need, and explain why you need the function and what function others need.
• Define what you intend to deliver based on your need. Concept of the product.
• Do a market survey for others' needs.
• Examine industry standards. Who builds these. What features do they have?
• break the design into modules.
• develop every single detail on the modules, while considering how the modules for together.
• Define a product strategy - a strategy for how you will provide value that will sell.
• Make a Concept design
• Create a tech tree of choices and evaluate which route you will go with for each module.
• For each technical choice, examine the cost to performance ratio. This is called cost engineering.
• Produce a Roadmap so that others can get involved. A clear product strategy allows this Roadmap to be created.
• Draw up a technical-conceptual diagram.
• Draw up a technical concept, fleshing out details covered in the technical-conceptual diagram.
• Draw up technical design in CAD
• Draw up build instructions. These will help you verify the design-for-ma ufacturing.