Microstructure plays a vital role in mechanical properties of materials and their behavior in manufacturing processes. Conventional tensile and compressive testing only provides bulk material properties whereas some micro-manufacturing processes require deeper understanding of material properties of individual phases. In this paper, ductile iron (DI) was used as an example engineering material to demonstrate how phase identification and nanoindentation is used to determine mechanical properties of each microstructure phase. Through metallographic investigation, it was found that the ductile iron sample consists of approximately 170 graphite nodules per mm2 with 82.5% nodularity, all embedded in pearlite and ferrite matrix. Nanoindentation experiments determined that out of the three phases present, graphite was the softest and pearlite was the hardest, which is in accordance to the common understanding. Ultimately, nanoindentation simulation was deployed to show that it is possible to use FE simulation iteratively to approximate plastic properties of each micro-phase in its microstructure. Microstructure properties obtained can be used to understand micro-manufacturing processes and/or as input parameters in microstructure based finite element (FE) simulations.