Ahhh, production time. The sweet smell of your final BOM in the air; you’re ready to start making some serious decisions. First, you need to decide what demand might be — how much should you order? You also need to think about the manufacturing supply chain, which will involve making decisions about board houses, manufacturers, and assembly houses. In production, the design you’ve created is built. To build your product effectively, the manufacturing process has to be designed to generate your product with the quality, quantity, and cost to succeed. Expect some design changes to suit production, as well as running design improvements to the product. These changes can be to the product to make it easier to manufacture (or support later), or improve the features and performance for consumers. It is important to validate your processes and the product early, so that changes or tweaks can be made before they are set in stone and become costly to change.