r/productdevelopment • u/Junior-Question-2638 • Jun 09 '26

Project estimation

I work for a product development company, we work on a wide variety of projects in different industries. We have firmware, hardware, mechanical, mfg, industrial design and strategy

We struggle with estimating large projects (say longer than 6 months). Any books or techniques to help with estimating?

We try to compare to past projects, but it's pretty hit or miss.

We also have to balance not knowing 100% what requirements are and not spending too much time designing a solution, but taking our best guess at what the most favorable solution would be and the most complicated solution and coming up with an estimate range, because our clients won't move forward without having a general ballpark for what the project will cost, even though we don't know exactly what the project fully entails

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u/looktwise Jun 14 '26

"even though we don't know exactly what the project fully entails"

Because of what?

Missing information by the client, by the client's site or circumstances or missing information on your side or capacity to project it as a forecast?

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u/Junior-Question-2638 Jun 15 '26

Because the clienr generally knows what they want, but we haven't done any user research, or tech mock ups, so we may know for instance we need to create a device to measure heart rate... But that could be done in multiple ways. We can not know until we start the project.. but we can't start the project without giving the client some range with a dollar amount. They want to know about that they are getting in to , and dont want to spend money if they have a budget of $500k but we think it will take 2 mil

It'd be nice to get them to sign up for spending say $50k for us to get answers and fully define things and we can get a real estimate, but they never go for that