…when contracting out electronic product design.
At Kynesim we have between us really quite a lot of experience in designing electronic products for other companies, so we think we know a thing or two about what skills our clients need to make working with us work for them. It was an interesting exercise then to ask that question of a passing AI and see whether or not we agreed.
The core principle that the AI came up with was pretty unarguable. The less in-house technical expertise you have as a client, the more you have to rely on the good faith of your contractor. Obviously as contractors we would like you to trust us, and without some degree of trust no project will go anywhere, but as the client you need some ability to verify that the project is actually going in the direction you want it to go in.
That said, the AI promptly split the in-house requirements into three areas, each containing three broad skills. We’ve noted before that AIs are prone to abusing the “rule of three” like this, and it has resulted in an over-focus on technical aspects to the detriment of other aspects of business.
The first category was technical oversight. The AI was very firm that a client needs a systems engineer with the ability to write clear, complete specifications, otherwise you can’t tell your contractor what to build. We disagree. We do have clients who create proper specifications like that, but such architecting skills are rarer than people assume. One of our core competencies is scoping out projects, asking questions of our clients to tease out the details that will inform later decisions. In effect we come up with that specification, usually in the form of a project outline. That in turn suggests that a client needs enough technical literacy to review the design and check it does in fact do what they want. They do not need to have a deep understanding, but the more expert they are the more likely they are to spot something wrong.
One technical skill that you will eventually want in-house is user interface design. While we and most other consultants are perfectly happy to design and build the user interfaces for a product, unless a consultancy advertises graphic design skills it is almost inevitable that clients will want to tweak the interface to reflect their branding, and change it whenever their branding changes. This is a skill that can be bought in from outside, and isn’t something that is needed immediately, but it is very useful to have in-house to keep consistency in how your products look and feel.
Moving on, we come to issues of product and IP management. While we commonly work directly with manufacturers, this is something that clients should have control over. We involve clients in all the major decisions about component choices and manufacturability, and do our best to explain the consequences of each decision. It is obviously beneficial to a client to have someone who understands supply chains and component life-cycles, because that is one area the client will have to take on once product development is complete. Manufacturing is not a static game; suppliers vary in their lead times, components become obsolete and must be replaced (a bigger risk than most people realise), and going back to a contractor for every little issue is not always a viable option. In our view, a competent production manager is one of the more important people a client can have.
The intellectual property of a product should belong to the client, though apparently this can be badly underspecified in contracts. Design files, schematics, firmware, bills of materials and so on are all things that should be delivered to the client along with the working firmware and hardware, but they aren’t things that a client needs experts in as such. What this does suggest that clients need is someone to handle the commercial relationship between client and contractor. This is one of the more critical things for a client, particularly if the client isn’t managing the project themselves. Someone needs to be monitoring things like what should be handed over and at least be aware of the costs and general progress of the project.
This segues nicely into the AI’s last set of points, commercial and project management. Project management is something that every project needs, but it doesn’t always have to be done by the client. If many contractors or the client’s own personnel are involved in the project, it makes more sense for project management to be in-house. Otherwise project management is one of the services we and many other contractors offer. Clients need to have some awareness of the state of the project, to be aware of how timescales are progressing and catching scheduling and overrun issues before they bite, but that can be at quite a light level. It is not unusual for progress reports to be part of the commercial relationship rather than the technical relationship between client and consultant.
There are a number of skills that it is useful for a client to have to make use of contractors — we’ve written an entire series of articles on things that can go wrong at various stages of development and what to do about them — but one gaping hole in the advice our AI offered was sales and marketing. If you have a device you intend to get out to the public, you need to be able to sell it! As contractors, this is one of the few areas of product development that we have little to do with. For some of our smaller clients, it can be terribly easy to overlook the need to market a product until it is actually in your hands. Larger clients usually already have sales and marketing departments, who will of course need to be involved at some point in the product development (the earlier they are involved, the more they can affect the overall design). Regardless, it is a skill that a client definitely needs to have in-house.
So there you have it. There are a lot of skills that are desirable for a client to have when using contractors, and more that are useful, but only a few we think of as core. You need to have some degree of technical oversight and the skills to back that up, you need commercial oversight of your relationship with your contractors, you need to manage the production chain once it’s up and running, and you need to be able to sell your product once it’s made. The more other skills you have the better, but these are the core.