It’s easy to send a project sideways: all you need to do is identify a brilliant, expedient solution and unleash your brightest designers and engineers to implement it. You’ll reach your destination even faster if you add some schedule pressure or cost constraints to the mix. The outcome is invariably disastrous.
A project is far more likely to succeed if the underlying problems are clearly identified and understood before Engineering begins. It is also likely to cost less. Starfish brings a wealth of diverse skills, experience, and training to every new project opportunity, but resources are squandered if they aren’t focused on the fundamental problems facing the client. Medical industry challenges require much broader understandings than mere cutting-edge technologies can address. The first question we ask – and we ask it many different ways – is: “What’s your problem?”
By engaging in use studies, workflow analyses, and consulting with a range of equipment users and practitioners, we’ve often found that pre-conceptions of how a product ought to work or look like might be biased or misinformed, and from those misperceptions, ill-defined for development or for market. We are entrepreneurial in our development approach and highly attuned to regulatory requirements. We also manufacture devices in our ISO-13485 facility. From these foundations, we ask questions about sales channels and markets, about revenue streams, product life-cycles and field support. This approach maximizes the likelihood that we’ll identify and design-out obstacles well before they are encountered.
A core value at Starfish is to solve the right problem. An initial engagement proposal from Starfish will contain an outline of research activities, it will reflect and incorporate an understanding of the intended market, and will list a set of deliverables that includes (or at least leads to) a Product Requirements Document that identifies the core problems and how best to resolve them. Starfish develops for the Medical Industry – and only the Medical Industry – from concept to product.