Product designs, committed.
In context: Stage 06 · Design · sub-stage 06.20
Where the chosen concept stops being a sketch and becomes CAD, drawings, packaging and a funded, defensible product.
The Product designs sub-stage turns one screened concept into a buildable thing: 3D CAD, basic drawings, marketing visuals, packaging and funding research, with a competing-product review to keep you honest. This is the work that makes the design real.
What the Product designs sub-stage is
This is where the chosen concept gets built into a proper product design. You take the one direction screened in Concepts and turn it into CAD, working drawings, the visuals that explain it and the packaging that carries it. Alongside the modelling, you check the funding picture and study the products you will be competing against, so the design that comes out is grounded in money and market, not just geometry.
In my experience this is the sub-stage where vague ideas either harden into something you can quote and build, or quietly fall apart. Modelling a thing forces decisions a sketch lets you dodge: wall thickness, fit, how parts come apart for assembly. Better to meet those problems here than on a production line.
For the £149 proofing box, this is where Dan and Anna’s chosen direction became a real model in Stockport: the Stoke-on-Trent ceramic body dimensioned, the Manchester PCB cavity placed, the lid fit resolved, and the whole thing drawn up against the BS EN clauses it would need to meet. We also priced the funding gap and pulled apart the proofing boxes already on the market before locking anything down.
What’s in this sub-stage
Six activities take the Product designs sub-stage from a chosen concept to a fully resolved, fundable design. Work them roughly in order.
How it fits the bigger picture
Product designs closes Stage 06 Design. It builds on the screened direction from the Concepts sub-stage and turns it into a resolved, drawn, funded design ready for detailed work. It feeds straight into Stage 07 Engineer, where the model and drawings get validated, refined and made production-ready. Get a clean, grounded design out of here and Engineer has real geometry to work with; leave it loose and Engineer spends its time fixing your CAD instead of engineering the product.
What it can do
It turns one chosen concept into a buildable, drawn and costed design, with packaging and a clear-eyed read of the competition. Done well, it ends with a model and drawings a supplier could quote from, and an honest view of what it takes to fund the thing to market.
What it can’t do
It can’t validate or production-prove the design; that is Stage 07 Engineer’s job. And it can’t fix a weak concept. If the direction coming out of Concepts was thin, polishing it in CAD just makes a thin idea look finished.
See the full 10-stage process →
Try it yourself
Take your own product and model its single hardest feature in CAD, the part you have been avoiding. Then write down the three closest competing products and one thing yours does better. If you can’t name that one thing, the design isn’t finished yet.
Or run the guided version. The Free Sprint covers the early stages; deeper design tools sit in the paid ladder. Start the Free Sprint →
— First in Product designs → Concept 3D CAD