At Mechanomy, we are building tools for the future of product design; as a researcher, designer, developer, manufacturer, seller, user, or supporter, this is your future. Technology does not improve by itself; tomorrow is only better if we work to make it so, and this work is efficient when we can separate real frustrations and limitations from hearsay and imaginings.
As we’ve approached Mechanomy, one of the key challenges has been testing our intuitions about customer pains and applying these to make the correct product decisions. For a wide variety of reasons, the business processes (design, development, manufacturing, and sales) used to create products are not discussed publicly, nor are they readily discernible from examining the final products. These processes are rightly regarded as competitive advantages, but this prevents hardware developers from drawing inspiration from their peers, and it limits our ability to discover and improve today’s workflows.
Today, we’re launching our first Development Trends survey at https://mechanomy.com/survey/index.php/956145?lang=en. We intend this survey to be a semiannual snapshot of the state, hopes, and pains of product development. Some questions are directly relevant to products we are building or considering, but more than that we feel it is important for the broader hardware design, development, and manufacturing community to regularly examine our tools and workflows, to seek to improve the ways that we build systems.
We would greatly appreciate your participation and candor in the survey, particularly if you feel we’ve overlooked some important aspect of your experience. After the survey closes on March 31st we’ll tally and publish the results and our observations. Please share this survey with your colleagues and friends and, as always, if you want to stay apprised of our efforts, say hi!