The inspiration for your next game-changing product just might be found in a design already on the market. But tearing down a product isn’t the same as reverse-engineering.
Reverse-engineering is intended to answer how a product is made so that the developer can replicate — or, let’s face it, rip off — someone else’s success.
By contrast, engaging in a product teardown is about understanding why certain design choices were made and analyzing the effectiveness of each one.
Taking an item apart allows you to:
- Explore why the designer chose certain features, construction techniques, and design approaches
- Compare and contrast features within competitor products
- Study unique mechanisms and design choices
- Expand your knowledge and your overall engineering horizons
- Solve major business challenges
- Find inspiration in unexpected places
To show you what we mean, we’ve taken apart three blood glucose monitors to demonstrate how to make a product teardown informative and worthwhile.
