howdoimakemyproduct.com

About

I've spent 15 years making things.

Not apps. Not dashboards. Physical products — the kind where a bad tolerance costs you a $40,000 tool rework and a missed deadline means empty shelves.

LD

Liam DewhurstHamilton, NZ

5 years

Pacific Helmets

Manufacturing fire fighting helmets (F15). Composite layup, injection moulding, assembly line management, quality systems. When a helmet fails, someone gets hurt — that changes how you think about product design.

2 years

Blender Design

Innovation consultancy. Working with clients across consumer products, medical devices, and industrial equipment. This is where I learned that most product failures aren't design failures — they're brief failures. People build the wrong thing because they skipped the thinking.

5 years

Metalform Group

Innovation and design management. Leading product development from concept through to production — sheet metal, plastics, electronics integration. Managing the full pipeline: customer brief, feasibility, prototyping, tooling, production ramp.

Now

Gallagher Security

Product Manager for Energized Perimeter. Managing the product lifecycle for physical security infrastructure — where software meets hardware meets high voltage. Still making things, just at a bigger scale.

Side project

This tool

Everything I learned about what makes a good product brief — distilled into a free tool. Because the best way to help someone make a product is to help them think clearly before they spend money.

Why this exists

Plenty of product tools out there for software. Almost nothing for the person with a sketch of a physical product and no idea what to do next.

I've sat across the table from hundreds of people with product ideas. The ones that succeed almost always have one thing in common: they did the homework before they spent the money. They knew who it was for, what problem it solved, what the competition looked like, and what features actually mattered.

The ones that fail usually skipped straight to “can you make this?” without answering “should you?”

This tool helps you answer “should you” before “can you.”