There's a lot to keep together....

Design

The world of product development has gotten a lot more complex, and a lot more confusing if you look at it for hte first time. However, if you dig in a little, you see that you don't always have to reinvent the wheel...you can get help to build on developments already out there.

Layout and certifications

You have to put the pieces together. This can be the step though where you can fall apart before you get started. Do you have the battery right? are the Cs&Rs laid out correctly ? Did you miss one line and now you have to go again for certification?

Prototypes

Oops. you try to build it yourself, or you try to work with a CM with no clue. This starts to look like when you try to fix your car yourself, or take it to the local garage you know nothing about...you want to take that car, and that first build, to someone you can trust.

Supply Chain

Pricing, Lead-times, and making sure you can keep getting parts in the future...its not easy. There is nothing better than getting everything up and running and finding out the parts for your next build will come in sometime after the next presidential election. Or they went EOL last week...

Production

Now its all together, and its time to get to rolling out in volume. But have you made the jump in your production location, your supply chain, and your channel to make it?

And Everything Else..

There's always a thousand things that come up along the way. What is the COO? What are the terms? Who makes this module? Where can I get the Firmware updates? You can't get blindsided.