Product Startup Podcast Episode 113: Develop Complex Hardware Products

00:00:00 Kevin Mako: Hello, product innovators. Today we learn from one of the leading electronic toy inventors on how founders can best develop complex hardware products.

00:00:11 Narrator: You're listening to the Product Startup Podcast, the show that helps bring your product idea to life by chatting with successful inventors,

00:00:20 Narrator: product developers, and hardware industry professionals. Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from initial

00:00:28 Narrator: idea to getting your product on store shelves. We're taking you step by step to build a functional product and scale your product business.

00:00:37 Narrator: Hosted by Kevin Mako, one of North America's leading experts on hardware development for small product businesses. Now, on to the show.

00:00:46 Kevin Mako: Welcome back, everyone. Today I'm very excited to introduce Bob Christopher to the show. Bob is the founder of Pleo, a massively successful robot dinosaur kids' toy with

00:00:55 Kevin Mako: hundreds of parts. This is one of his many products and product companies over a long and successful history in the product. innovation world.

00:01:02 Kevin Mako: He was also the director of innovation at Panasonic, and sits on a number of advisory boards at hardware incubators around the world. Today, Bob is going to share some valuable

00:01:10 Kevin Mako: knowledge in how inventors, startups, and small manufacturers can understand what it takes to

00:01:14 Kevin Mako: design and develop complicated mechanical and or electronic consumer products with many development lessons he has learned along the way. Now on to the episode.

00:01:23 Kevin Mako: Hey, Bob, welcome to the show. Thank you. Excited to have you on today. You've not only launched a number of products,

00:01:29 Kevin Mako: two major robotics products into the consumer market that many people will know. But you've also been the director of innovation for Panasonic.

00:01:36 Kevin Mako: So you have been in the innovation sphere around hardware for a long time and have a tremendous amount of experience. And today, obviously,

00:01:43 Kevin Mako: we're going to be talking about some of the best practices to developing your product and working with your engineering team.

00:01:48 Kevin Mako: So as a quick background and highlight, how did you get to where you

00:01:52 Bob Christopher: are? I used to be back in the day, I was an orthopedic surgical medical development for new types of products for orthopedic surgeons.

00:02:00 Bob Christopher: And I got really tired of basic working at the big company. I thought, let's develop something that's cool.

00:02:06 Bob Christopher: And I just kind of fast forward, but through this complete circumstance, I met my co-founder of my first robot company, Caleb Chung, who is the, he's kind of a famous guy.

00:02:15 Bob Christopher: He was the founder, creator of the Furby. So if anybody knows Furby, it's this little animatronic toy. And billions of dollars of Furby's been sold. So it's a pretty big success.

00:02:26 Bob Christopher: Anyway, we connected in a, in his, actually his brother's place, he showed me this video of this like robot moving and walking lifelike.

00:02:34 Bob Christopher: And it was like, you know, it looked like a living creature. And I thought, wow, this is amazing. How did you do this? We, of course,

00:02:40 Bob Christopher: then came together and thought about this and then built the company and the product around this tech that he invented. And so that was kind of really beginning of me getting into

00:02:50 Bob Christopher: robotics. So got involved with Caleb, built this company called Ygobe, which made the PLEO robot. And if people don't know PLEO, Google Search, is pretty cool robot.

00:03:00 Bob Christopher: It was a journey. It was a journey into the development of hardware. And how do you make this stuff work? For those that know PLEO, it's a robot dinosaur.

00:03:07 Bob Christopher: It has 1,847 parts, 14 servos, 38 sensors. It's a fully autonomous being. Doesn't have any remote control.

00:03:16 Bob Christopher: It has AI built into it. It's learning. It's a robot toy. It's not like. it's going to be evolving into something, but it's a really cool, sophisticated robot.

00:03:25 Bob Christopher: We built a really cool product. It took a long time to get there.

00:03:29 Bob Christopher: And part of this is I just learned so much about building hardware in this journey. When I built the company, I realized that this is a

00:03:37 Bob Christopher: really, you know, you cannot be not involved in engineering. You have to be involved in the actual

00:03:43 Bob Christopher: development. So I got, I was very much involved with the firmware, electrical engineering, some mechanical

00:03:48 Bob Christopher: design and learned a lot with my team about, I mean, this is amazing. We were always testing

00:03:55 Bob Christopher: our engineering and our design around the experience envelope. We're like, what's that envelope we really want to have?

00:04:03 Bob Christopher: And Caleb was good, I mean, he was religious about this. He was like, this is the experience. Come to Steve Jobs like this. You have to have this experience.

00:04:11 Bob Christopher: Otherwise, everything sucks. And his comment was, it's easy to make things like broken. So you can overpromise your product because do all these things.

00:04:19 Bob Christopher: And then, of course, it's going to look broken.

00:04:21 Kevin Mako: And because it's not going to do it all the time. And so we were very concerned about just not putting too much out there with our product. We want it in terms of promises.

00:04:31 Kevin Mako: Promises are a big thing, especially for a new hardware founder.

00:04:34 Kevin Mako: And you're involved in making very complicated products, which is great to have you to talk about

00:04:38 Kevin Mako: on the show today because a lot of consumer products, especially these days when you're getting complex mechanisms mixed with electronics, mixed with robotics, mixed with robotics,

00:04:45 Kevin Mako: mixed with different material science. And as you said, going into all sorts of maybe experimental things, like a new set of gears, all of these things add complexities.

00:04:53 Kevin Mako: So the best thing that you can do as a founder, first and foremost, is making sure to condense that into your starter products. So you're not trying to do too many things at once.

00:05:02 Kevin Mako: You can always scale into other things. We've talked about that quite a bit on the show. So I appreciate that you brought that up.

00:05:08 Kevin Mako: Another thing I found very interesting about what you brought up is mentioning about you working heavily with your engineering and design team.

00:05:17 Kevin Mako: You're the type of founder that you didn't want to just sit it and have them go and run at it and talk to the months later and see where they were

00:05:23 Kevin Mako: at. You wanted to be involved on a regular basis to make sure that the design and engineering

00:05:27 Kevin Mako: that was happening was matching the vision that you had for the product down the road. The vision

00:05:32 Kevin Mako: for your product was testament to both you and your founder on what was important from a user

00:05:35 Kevin Mako: experience perspective and then making sure that trickled down to the day-to-day design and engineering. Can you highlight a bit more about what you found was working in

00:05:44 Bob Christopher: managing a design and engineering team, especially because we're talking about a complicated product and how

00:05:50 Bob Christopher: that ended up being a very big success based on that work you were doing with the design team in the early days?

00:05:55 Bob Christopher: Yeah, in the early days, it was actually pretty natural, organic. We just, everything kind of flowed. But then as we got the company a bigger, we had to definitely think

00:06:01 Bob Christopher: about how to build the right layers of people.

00:06:06 Bob Christopher: And so my, my offices were, main offices were in Emeryville Berkeley, but our R&D facilities were in Boise, Idaho. That was a challenge because we had to go fly back and forth.

00:06:16 Bob Christopher: But I had about 25 guys working for me in Boise. And, you know, I think it comes down, Kevin, really the right people.

00:06:23 Bob Christopher: I mean, my CTO and my BP of Engineering were just amazing, really good. They had this kind of, I mean, I'll say the glass half full. They knew the

00:06:30 Bob Christopher: possibilities that were up against and also, of course, the challenges. What I would say, my engineering group back in Boise would always think about things.

00:06:39 Bob Christopher: in a very curious level and of course we'd want to challenge the development but is always around

00:06:45 Bob Christopher: the experience envelope it is mentioned so we always wanted to test you know acid test everything

00:06:52 Bob Christopher: against this what is expert so we had to spend time actually defining what the experience

00:06:57 Bob Christopher: how's it going to move how's it going to what's the how's the software going to work that what's that experience we want to have from pleo and we had this what they call

00:07:07 Bob Christopher: an ethos we had this kind of like like seven, seven criteria that PLEO always had to meet. And all the engineering decisions had to kind of follow that criteria.

00:07:17 Bob Christopher: And if it was out of whack, we would do it. So it worked out really well. It was kind of surprising. We made a lot of decisions about hard decisions about hardware with

00:07:27 Bob Christopher: using this guidepost. Kind of, okay, this isn't going to really support the experience and the brand and the image we want to create with the product. We went out on a press tour.

00:07:36 Bob Christopher: And I remember us going out and like, I think it was talking to Walt Mossburg back in New York, Wall Street Journal. He was a big guy at the time.

00:07:43 Bob Christopher: And he said to us, hey, man, your, your robots got a battery built into it. You can't take it out. He was saying, you know, it's going to be a problem for you guys.

00:07:51 Bob Christopher: And so we agreed. So we had to stop. We actually were going into manufacturing. We had to stop our manufacturing schedule and then

00:07:59 Bob Christopher: regroup and then figure out a way to basically create a removable battery.

00:08:05 Bob Christopher: And we did it. We did it within like six weeks, we had redesigned it.

00:08:09 Bob Christopher: And within three months, we had the whole redesign put into China, and they were, they were building molds on it.

00:08:15 Bob Christopher: So we just got it in time, literally for the first week in Christmas, it was just in time to ship the first 5,000 units out.

00:08:24 Bob Christopher: I got to say, my investors, they were so worried. And everyone was like under pins and needles, of course, it was like a, that kind of, it was make or break time, right?

00:08:33 Bob Christopher: but we knew what we were doing was the right thing to do. So we had all these different design approaches to solving problems around, again, this kind of experience envelope.

00:08:43 Bob Christopher: And then I guess that also reflected on our team. So we had this way of looking at things about solving problems. Again, kind of glass half full.

00:08:51 Bob Christopher: And I wanted people who were challenging that wanted to challenge the engineering decision in the good way, right? So let's make this better.

00:08:59 Bob Christopher: Let's make this faster. Let's make this. let's change this part, make it more interesting. That was the kind of the MO, the mode of operation with my engineering team.

00:09:09 Bob Christopher: So as a founder, I was there a lot. I was spent a lot of time with our group in China. In fact, it was always kind of like this weird thing in China where

00:09:18 Bob Christopher: you almost had to be an ambassador on behalf of your company with these manufacturers and these

00:09:24 Bob Christopher: suppliers because they'll test you. They'll see if you have the business discipline or

00:09:32 Bob Christopher: the wherewithal, like, are these, like, they'll look at you and say, is this person going to have a product that's really going to be successful?

00:09:38 Bob Christopher: And they kind of give you that look like, are they going to sell me, are they going to make hundreds of thousands of these things or is this like 2000? You know, it's like that.

00:09:46 Bob Christopher: And you had to really kind of prove your metal. There was a, I mean, a lot of really tough engineering decisions, though. And I think the thing that I would say about is

00:09:55 Bob Christopher: you're going to have, I mean, you're building any hardware. You have this kind of, we call it the renaissance mode, it's like you have to play in different camps.

00:10:04 Bob Christopher: You can't play only in an electrical engineering. You can't only play in mechanical engineer. You got to you got to be able to dance back and

00:10:11 Bob Christopher: forth. And so if you think of your team as like siloed, like they're only electrical engineers and

00:10:18 Bob Christopher: these guys are mechanical and these guys are software, you're going to have all sorts of translation issues with your development path.

00:10:24 Bob Christopher: There's just going to be all these things that don't, that need the kind of the mix of the two together.

00:10:31 Bob Christopher: And so we learned a lot about, you know, it's just kind of, as an engineer, you just have to have these multiple skills and be willing to test them all the time

00:10:41 Bob Christopher: and then be willing to learn. But anyway, there's lots of little, there's like the little mini sprints we had to go through in building that product.

00:10:49 Bob Christopher: Fast forward, I've been involved with other robots like I was involved with the launch of Jebo.

00:10:56 Bob Christopher: Gibo is a robot for the home. And Cynthia Brazil from MIT Media Lab, who's very famous because of her work on social robots,

00:11:05 Bob Christopher: she was behind the company. And we built this amazing robot.

00:11:09 Kevin Mako: The idea was, and we learned this with Cleo, was when everything moves,

00:11:14 Kevin Mako: when anything moves or robot moves, we have this tendency to be anthropomorphic. We want to, you know, we want to see life in it. We think it's alive.

00:11:23 Kevin Mako: Like people call their vacuum cleaners by name because they looked it as a pet.

00:11:29 Kevin Mako: And so with Gibo, we wanted to have the anthropomorphic relationship in a very organic way.

00:11:35 Kevin Mako: So when he moved his head and looked at you with curiosity, you had to have that exact look like if somebody said, hey, what's up?

00:11:42 Kevin Mako: It sounds like there's two main themes here that really helped you design a great product, even though it was complicated.

00:11:47 Kevin Mako: First, you had a very clear vision of what you were looking to do. And that's what you said you had specifically seven guiding principles.

00:11:53 Kevin Mako: that you needed this to do, that would guide all of the rest of the decisions, whether it was

00:11:58 Kevin Mako: industrial design on the visual side, whether it was mechanical engineering, whether it was electronic engineering or software, all of these teams were essentially building

00:12:06 Kevin Mako: that model via that vision of those seven principles. And then second, you have mentioned the test

00:12:12 Kevin Mako: and refine element a few times, where you really were putting the effort into not only push

00:12:19 Kevin Mako: your team, but also push your own inside in terms of how could you develop this thing to be relatively simple, not to feature creep or not to overpromise to your eventual

00:12:29 Kevin Mako: customers or to your partners or shareholders or other stakeholders, but really focusing on those seven core

00:12:34 Bob Christopher: principles and then testing and refining it continually until you got a product that you genuinely

00:12:39 Bob Christopher: believed in. So much as you were mentioning that it was right up to that, you're ready to deliver

00:12:43 Bob Christopher: and it's at the factory, but there was something that you knew needed to be done based on feedback that you were listening to that made that happen.

00:12:50 Bob Christopher: So I find that's something that's so important when you're designing a new product is really being focused on what you want to do,

00:12:55 Bob Christopher: keeping it narrow, not feature creeping, and then simultaneously making sure to build and test

00:12:59 Bob Christopher: and refined. How many prototypes do you figure you went through in designing this and testing it are pieces? And over what period of time did this take?

00:13:07 Bob Christopher: It took over two years, two years to build it. So it's so funny you mentioned this to you, Kev. Thanks for the question of that because it

00:13:14 Bob Christopher: reminded me what we would always tell ourselves is we're like okay we're building and breaking build it and break it build it and then find out how it breaks what's the problem and

00:13:23 Bob Christopher: it was like build and break and then we had of course you know milestones we had to hit and the biggest milestone that we had

00:13:32 Bob Christopher: to hit was it Pleo had to walk you know is this is going from a prototype to an actual commercial version that's a big big leap right now you're talking about you

00:13:40 Bob Christopher: know your own servos your own not off-the-shelf service and things like this.

00:13:45 Bob Christopher: But we, yeah, those seven principles were so important. In fact, they, they guided almost everything from packaging.

00:13:53 Bob Christopher: I mean, literally our packaging was designed by that too.

00:13:57 Bob Christopher: And we, you know, we had some help. I had some people who came in and worked with us from Lucas Films and then Blizzard.

00:14:06 Bob Christopher: You know, there's some interesting cultures that were kind of infused in our culture. And you're like, you know, gang guys.

00:14:12 Bob Christopher: and they're like talking about like, how do you think about a character from a game perspective and then how do you build a relationship with it?

00:14:20 Bob Christopher: Anyways, it's all this kind of interesting perspectives from building it. But it always came down to seven principles. And then I think people don't realize this.

00:14:28 Kevin Mako: You're always, always, always building and breaking. I mean, you might have a release and say, this is my public release. This is my product. Great.

00:14:37 Kevin Mako: But it's not done yet. You got to always continually improve that design.

00:14:42 Kevin Mako: and optimize it or go to the next design, but you always have to be building it and challenging

00:14:47 Kevin Mako: it. And I think that's a lot of, I feel like a lot of robot companies just don't do that. They just

00:14:52 Kevin Mako: kind of, they build it and they set it and then they kind of just, they optimize it or modified a little bit.

00:14:58 Kevin Mako: Like that ingenuity part of it kind of gets, gets sidelined. And I feel

00:15:04 Kevin Mako: there's a lot of missed opportunities with hardware design when you just kind of sit back and think, oh, it's done, you know, and it's never done.

00:15:14 Kevin Mako: Well, something that you mentioned, which is part of the guiding principles, you know, you've got your seven principles.

00:15:21 Kevin Mako: But then on top of that, it seems like you were listening to various stakeholders a lot to then come back to build and

00:15:27 Bob Christopher: break and improve your next version. Listening is a huge piece of the development process, both

00:15:34 Bob Christopher: to your internal team, but also to external stakeholders, as you did throughout that process. You mentioned you're bringing in film companies and game crews.

00:15:41 Bob Christopher: That's amazing. Before you've even launched a market, you're bringing in this incredible insight, especially probably further on in the development process.

00:15:49 Bob Christopher: So you've got your core technology built. Now you're improving and refining it. So you've got enough meat on the bones to make people excited about your product, external

00:15:58 Bob Christopher: stakeholders. There is a manufacturer that you cut a deal with or whether these big companies like

00:16:03 Bob Christopher: Blizzard and Lucas Films, those people you're listening to and here, collecting their feedback, applying it to your seven principles, you know, aligning it with those principles,

00:16:13 Bob Christopher: and then making your product better as a result. Exactly. That's exactly right. It was, it was, it's having the appetite to go there. I mean, it takes some, it takes some guts.

00:16:21 Bob Christopher: It takes courage to kind of, because you're going to be put yourself out there and taking on risk, right? You don't know what you don't know.

00:16:28 Bob Christopher: But that's okay. And that's part of the, that's part of the fun. I mean, If you're building hardware, make it fun, you know, that's going to be infused in your product.

00:16:36 Bob Christopher: And if it's laborious and, you know, you've got to, I would say, step back and rethink about what you're doing because, you know, create your own principles.

00:16:45 Bob Christopher: Create your own three, four, five, seven, whatever principles you think that. And we like, we're saying, for example, PLEO, I think we had three life form.

00:16:53 Bob Christopher: We had laws of life form. So we called PLEO a life form, not a robot. So three laws of life forms, it must evolve over time.

00:17:00 Bob Christopher: It must be autonomous and it must be aware of its environment. So it has to know that it's at the edge of the table or, you know, because it can't be contextually unaware.

00:17:10 Bob Christopher: That would break the illusion of PLEO. And then it has to evolve. Like all Plios were built so that their

00:17:19 Bob Christopher: personalities would evolve over time based upon the interactions you had with the robot. So some of the robots were kind of, say, shy

00:17:28 Bob Christopher: and not so interactive because their owners didn't interact with them too much. They were kind of, you know, lonely.

00:17:35 Bob Christopher: Other ones are very social. Other ones are kind of mischievous and kind of causing problems because they would do things. They would knock things off tables, you know.

00:17:44 Bob Christopher: I mean, they would, they, Pleo can be a little mischievous. It was fun about it.

00:17:49 Kevin Mako: You know, we were inspired by Apple's early on when Steve launched the Mac. They created these user groups around the country about Mac,

00:17:57 Kevin Mako: people using the Mac and coming together and sharing notes and stuff. And we did the same thing of PLEO. We did PLEO groups around the country.

00:18:05 Kevin Mako: So people got the robots together and they have these experiences. But that was part of, it was like magic, you know, things you didn't expect. And that's what Caleb would say.

00:18:12 Kevin Mako: It's like you always have to create these Easter eggs that people don't expect with your robot or your product. Because that's the part that delights people.

00:18:21 Kevin Mako: Like they discovered something with your product that they wasn't, it wasn't published, it's not on the box, but something you discovered.

00:18:28 Kevin Mako: And that's what the Furby effect kind of. it was. People didn't know what Furby was going to do until they had a Furby, right? So kind of same thing with PLEO.

00:18:37 Kevin Mako: Like, didn't know PLEO was going to do until it actually became alive and was on your desktop. But again, that's part of the seven laws that we were we were working against.

00:18:44 Kevin Mako: I know you have a hard stop coming up. And I absolutely love the way that you, you know, concluded all of this with the journey is part of the fun.

00:18:54 Kevin Mako: And that's really, you know, all the things we talked about today, as you are a hardware development firm going through your own journey

00:18:59 Kevin Mako: right now. Just remember that, yeah, there are trials and tribulations. There are things you are purposely breaking stuff.

00:19:04 Kevin Mako: You're going to run into delays and roadblocks and other complications. You're going to have a variety of stakeholders. You're going to have conflicts. All of that's

00:19:12 Kevin Mako: part of the journey of making a magical product at the end of the day. So, Bob, I really appreciate all your words of wisdom today.

00:19:18 Kevin Mako: Thanks again for joining us on the show. Thanks, Kevin. We're really

00:19:20 Narrator: great to talk to you. Take care. Bye-bye. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the product startup podcast, the show that teaches you what it really takes to bring your

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00:19:39 Narrator: and leading firm in North America to provide global caliber in-to-end physical consumer product

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00:20:04 Narrator: Thanks for listening and see you next time.