Green Shoe Garage est. 2012

What We Do · File No. 03

Our Product Development Process

Inspired by Vitruvius: durable, useful, and beautiful. A proven nine-step workflow built for digital-first design and fabrication.

Firmatis

Durability

It must stand up robustly and remain in good condition.

Utilitas

Utility

It should be useful and function well for the people using it.

Venustatis

Beauty

It should delight people and raise their spirits.

We have spent years weighing development paradigms: agile, SCRUM, lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, human-centered design, design thinking, and chaos engineering. Some firms treat these like religions; others dismiss them as buzzwords. Our struggles with the existing options were many:

  1. Agile and SCRUM are very software-centric. What about hardware products?
  2. Traditional systems engineering adds a lot of non-value work. Great for systems maintained for 25 to 100 years, but what about products that must reach market fast?
  3. Six Sigma suits large companies where the benefits outweigh the overhead. What about small, nimble start-ups?
  4. Our team is geographically dispersed, so paper-driven processes won’t work. Can we be completely digital for engineering, project management, and support?
  5. Security always seems like an afterthought. How can we bake it into the design process?
  6. We have only one planet. What happens when a product reaches the end of its design life? Can it be recycled or disposed of safely?

Our goal has always been to build products that are durable, useful, and beautiful, quickly and on budget, while blending traditional craftsmanship with modern tools. So we developed a unique, now-proven workflow that takes the best ideas from the legacy paradigms and modernizes them for digital-only design and fabrication.

The development lifecycle: six hexagonal stages from research and development through conceptual design, rapid prototyping, detailed engineering, custom fabrication and assembly, to laboratory and real-world testing

The EYE Chart

A more engineering-y look.

Don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as it looks.

The Green Shoe Garage systems engineering Vee diagram titled Getting a Hardware Product to Market, mapping decomposition, implementation, and integration across requirements, design, build, test, verification, validation, and regulatory acceptance, alongside an Agile project-management board
TitleGetting a Hardware Product to Market Dwg NoGSG-PROC-001 Rev2.0 Sheet1 / 1

The Secret Sauce

Our Nine-Step Design Flow

  1. Figure out the problem to be solved

    Requirements development, ideation, use cases, constraints, rough-order cost / schedule analysis, and technology maturation.

  2. Explore potential solutions

    Market studies, conceptual and functional analysis, feasibility studies, rapid prototyping and mockups, and a top-level system architecture.

  3. Refine the big picture

    Proof-of-concept and form / fit / function prototypes, an iterative design-test loop, and finalized requirements, cost, schedule, and use cases.

  4. Design the solution

    Detailed design and engineering, BOM, dependencies, documentation, and test / verification / validation procedures, refined to be manufacturable, sustainable, secure, and testable.

  5. Build the solution

    In-house fabrication wherever possible, global partners for complex tooling, and final assembly of the looks-like / works-like prototype with DfM documentation.

  6. Test the tech

    Unit and integration testing, verification of technology and design, and validated failure-modes analysis.

  7. Test the product

    Solution validation, user acceptance testing, live testing in real-world environments, and optimization based on feedback.

  8. Hack and harden

    Assess cyber and physical vulnerabilities that could be exploited, then design and implement the fixes.

  9. Prepare for manufacturing

    Low-volume manufacturing to refine the BOM, COGS, M/ECAD packages, and source code, plus introductions to industry-leading manufacturing partners.

Thinking About the Future

Design for everything.

Building a prototype is one thing. Building a sellable product means planning, from the very beginning, for everything that turns a prototype into a product.

  • Manufacturing
  • Cost / Procurement
  • End User (UX, ergonomics)
  • Testing & Inspection
  • Assembly
  • Safety
  • Sustainability
  • Logistics
  • Disposal
  • Security
  • Hackability
  • Maintainability & Repair
  • Upgradeability

You Own It

Empowering our clients.

We take IP seriously. Our clients own their intellectual property; we retain no IP rights. Every engagement delivers:

  • Feasibility studies, specifications, and evaluation reports
  • Schematic / PCB / Gerber files
  • CAD design and fabrication files for all mechanical components
  • Bill of Materials (BOM)
  • Software and firmware source code
  • Looks-like and works-like prototypes
  • Project documentation and assembly instructions
  • Test plans and reports
  • Video tutorials and professional product photography
  • Technical and artistic illustrations
A comparison table, Finding the Optimum Path to Production: the Maker Ethos, the Tradigital Approach, and Traditional Engineering rated on speed to prototype, engineering rigor, cost efficiency, and ideal use case, with the Tradigital approach highlighted as the balanced path

Ready When You Are

Let's turn your idea into a tangible object.

Concept to delivered product. Mechanical, electronics, and software, built under one roof. Quickly and within budget.

Schedule a Consultation