The following is an article written by Boston Engineering Client Relations Executive Troy Barber. Troy has over 20 years of product development experience, working closely with senior level product professionals in the medical device, life science, industrial, and consumer product markets to help bring their most critical products & technologies to market.
For additional details on this topic, or for any questions you may have, reach out to troy directly by email: tbarber@boston-engineering.com
Beware The Pied Piper of Design Debt
I was at lunch recently with an old colleague of mine and the topic of “design debt” came up.
If you haven’t heard the expression before, “design debt” is the term given to the accumulation of shortcuts and concessions in a product design frequently made to get an “MVP”—or “Minimal Viable Product”—to market.
Boston Engineering had previously worked with my buddy’s employer on a design for manufacturing effort, and I was curious what had happened to the product in the interim. We were originally hired because our client’s flagship product was, in fact, the textbook definition of an MVP product: it was the culmination of many years of ad hoc build, test, and refinement steps and expedient design decisions made to address particular challenges that arose during development without addressing a more comprehensive, systems level approach.
For MVP products that get released commercially, design debt will continue to accumulate “interest.” If this design debt is not paid back with design optimization, the prospects for long-term commercial success could be in jeopardy.
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In a competitive environment, the “Pied Piper of Design Debt” most likely will need to be paid, but if a company’s kludgy, glorified prototype is the first entrant into a market and owns its market outright, design debt may accumulate sight unseen while adoption expands.
It is often only when a competitor subsequently enters the market with a design that has been optimized that design debts come due in uniquely painful ways: competitors often teardown the early entrant’s glorified prototype systems, improve upon obvious design flaws, and release a product that performs better—or at least equivalently—to the MVP product it ripped off.
The optimized, new product competitor is typically cheaper to manufacture and undercuts the street price of the original MVP product that may have actually created the very market or industry it once dominated.
Ready to Turn Design Trade-Offs Into Strategic Advantage?
Boston Engineering helps forward-thinking companies build products that last—by planning for what comes next.
Let’s talk about how we can help you understand and mitigate design debt across your product lifecycle. Visit the Boston Engineering Design Debt Page today to learn more -->
In a perfect world, if you are a product manufacturer that faces little or no competition, you may be able to successfully go to market with products that have not been optimized for various performance requirements or specifications such as design for manufacturing, design for assembly, design for shock, design for whatever.
Nonetheless, we live in an imperfect world, and my advice to you would be to intermittently assess the design of your product or products before the design debt collector shows up.
Every product involves trade-offs. Design debt is what happens when you don’t plan for them. To learn more about Design Debt in Product Development, visit the Boston Engineering Design Debt page today.
As the engineering landscape continues to evolve, Boston Engineering is committed to proactively integrating cutting-edge technologies and methodologies into the solutions it delivers, ensuring that clients stay at the forefront of industry trends and maintain a competitive edge in 2025 and beyond.
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For three decades, Boston Engineering has designed, developed, and optimized devices and technologies the medical community relies on to save lives, enrich quality of life, and reduce costs to the healthcare system. We provide solutions to the challenges in the adoption of surgical robotics.
Our expertise includes industrial design and product redesign, sensors and control systems, robotics technical innovation, and digital software solutions.
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