The way we design products has fundamentally changed.
Since the inception of cloud computing there has been a dramatic shift, of key software and knowledge work, into the cloud. This is changing the way we create, the way we innovate, the way we work together. Cloud Engineering has revolutionized the way products are designed. Today, engineering can happen in any place and at any time, least of all by drones sitting behind obsolete workstations. The kind of accessibility that the cloud brings, and the pace it allows, cannot be ignored.
"Products are no longer created in silos. It's an ongoing collaboration between designers, engineers, suppliers and manufacturers."
Cloud Engineering is built on ever changing relationships between your team, your manufacturers, your suppliers and your customers at large. As product cycles become shorter and leaner the less you can afford to work in anything but in harmony with your ecosystem. Collaboration means doing more with less. But these collaborative pressures mean new tools, new workflows, and new paradigms of design. Change can be scary, we know, but with Upverter it doesn't have to be.
With Cloud Engineering comes a whole new set of rules, fundamentally changing the way successful products make it to market.
Design used to take place in in tools like Word and Visio. Huge archaic documents were written, printed, reviewed, and re-written long before a design ever got started.
Today, great products start as prototypes and then get rapidly iterated on. You need to reduce your time between idea and first prototype to almost zero. You need a tool that allows for ideation, creation, prototyping and most importantly, iteration.
Designers used to pride themselves on how independent they were. They were measured by how much they could do on their own. They shipped products almost completely alone with little management, assistance, or team work.
Today, great products get designed by great teams. They work together, in unison, measured not by their individual performance, but rather by the performance of the whole. You need a tool that allows for this collaboration. You need to super charge your team and start measuring, not by hours of work spent, but by deadlines met.
Designers used to work in a mess of different tools, all loosely tied together by ancient netlist files. CAD packages used to brag about back-annotations, and any number of other features to ease the pain of switching tools.
Today, through the power of APIs and the cloud, software can be seamlessly integrated. Schematics and layouts can both be worked on simultaneously. Exports are in open-source formats, chock full of human readable meta-data. You need a tool that integrates seamlessly from ideation all the way through prototyping.