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Guest: Kelly Schmutte, Lecturer at Stanford d.school.
Host: Kevin Mako, founder of Product Startup and the leading expert in hardware startup consulting. A hardware entrepreneur since 1999, Kevin has advised more than 1,500 founders and built and scaled MAKO Invent through its acquisition by TriMech in 2024.
How to Navigate Ambiguity in Product Development
Kelly Schmutte explains how product teams can frame ambiguity, test assumptions, learn through prototypes, and plan for unexpected development results. You will also hear practical guidance on product strategy, prototype and testing plans, decision gates, expert coordination, and commercialization risk.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
- Defining ambiguity – The quality of being open to more than one interpretation
- How does it apply to hardware product design, and how can you plan for the unexpected?
- Framing the problem, then asking why that problem is important
- How do you then go about solving the problem?
- What is some of the academic research around ambiguity in design
- How do you use this in hardware design
- The importance prototyping
- Prototype to learn at first, then prototype to figure it out, then prototype to perfect it and validate it.
Episode transcript
This transcript is provided for accessibility and reference. Download the SRT transcript.
Read the full episode transcript
Kevin Mako: Hello, product innovators. Today we learned from a lecturer at the Stanford Institute of Design on the importance of planning
Kevin Mako: for ambiguity when going through physical product development.
Narrator: You're listening to the Product Startup Podcast, the show that helps bring your product idea to life by chatting with successful inventors,
Narrator: product developers, manufacturers, and hardware industry professionals. Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from initial
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.
Narrator: Hosted by Kevin Mako, one of North America's leading experts on hardware development for small product businesses. Now, onto the show.
Kevin Mako: Welcome back, everyone. Today, I'm very excited to introduce Kelly Schmutte to the show. Kelly is a dual degree graduate and a lecturer at Stanford University at d.school.
Kevin Mako: She has also worked at IDO and on product development of many hardware products, including designing
Kevin Mako: and running her own product called Perfect Fit, one of the world's leading professional dance shoes. She is also the co-author of the design book Navigating Ambiguity.
Kevin Mako: Today, Kelly is going to share some valuable knowledge on how inventors, startups, and small manufacturers can understand ambiguity
Kevin Mako: and unexpected circumstances within the product development journey and how to maximize the value of your product through prototyping and testing before going into manufacturing.
Kevin Mako: Now, on to the episode. Hey, Kelly, welcome to the show. Hi, Kevin. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you as well. understand you're getting quite used to this whole audio world.
Kevin Mako: You just finished recording an
Kelly Schmutte: entire audiobook of your recent publication. That's right. That's right. We spent a whole day doing the audio book recording of navigating ambiguity.
Kelly Schmutte: So I've been practicing, listening to my voice and getting used to the weirdness of that.
Kevin Mako: But it's been really, really fun. Yeah, there's a whole another world. A lot of devils in the details in audio recording, which you don't realize until you're in
Kelly Schmutte: those situations, right? Oh, yeah, I'm sure. Definitely. There were certain phrases as we were reading them that's like, hmm, didn't think about what a tongue twister that
Kevin Mako: would be to say out loud. Give us a bit of a background on how you got to where
Kelly Schmutte: you are today. Yeah. So I'd say I grew up being both kind of right-brained and left-brain. My favorite subjects growing up in school were
Kelly Schmutte: math and also art.
Kelly Schmutte: And so I was always intrigued about how I would be able to combine these things. I was considering a career in architecture, perhaps civil engineering.
Kelly Schmutte: My dad's a civil engineer. And it wasn't until I got to college that I discovered a degree program called product design.
Kelly Schmutte: I went to Stanford, went through the product design program there.
Kelly Schmutte: And it was this amazing blend of both of those pieces, kind of the thinking about how to solve problems and getting into the details of solving them
Kelly Schmutte: from a real mechanical, intuitive understanding way, as well as the more expressive artistic elements of design.
Kelly Schmutte: And then this third piece, which really spoke to me and my personality, but I hadn't yet put together, which is around human center design.
Kelly Schmutte: So how are you really always designing for human needs? How are you letting that both serve as the initial inspiration for what you might
Kelly Schmutte: create, seeing that inspiration comes from outside of yourself, and then letting that serve as your guide throughout your creative process.
Kelly Schmutte: And so I feel super fortunate that I kind of stumbled into that program and it opened my eyes to what a career in design and entrepreneurship could be.
Kelly Schmutte: And from that experience, went on to work in design consulting for a bit and then eventually
Kelly Schmutte: came back to Stanford for some more studying and then ultimately teaching at the d.school.
Kelly Schmutte: And in parallel, launched a company from a product that I invented using,
Kevin Mako: methods that I learned in the design program. That's amazing. I'm really excited to have you on the show because you've got the academic
Kevin Mako: experience going through all this schooling at Stanford as well as being in the consulting world, but also starting your own product, perfect fit for ballet, which is a
Kevin Mako: product that's sold to can be the highest and most picky customer, which is the best of the best in the world at a particular sport.
Kevin Mako: So it's incredible that you've got both those pieces of intel as well as working with David Kelly, obviously from IDO and the founder of d.school.
Kevin Mako: So you've got a lot of experience working both in the academic setting and the school of Hard Knocks in the real world, which is, it's really exciting.
Kevin Mako: So I'm glad that you put that book together on navigating ambiguity, which is the title of the book and is obviously the premise of the book.
Kevin Mako: Talk a bit about the concept of ambiguity and how ambiguity applies to
Kelly Schmutte: designing hardware. Yeah, great. Well, first off, we had no idea when we started writing this book. at what was around the corner.
Kelly Schmutte: We started working on it in summer 2019, so not knowing a global pandemic would be upon us all shortly thereafter and just how much we'd all be thrown into
Kelly Schmutte: and have a lot of ambiguity thrust upon us all. So, I mean, we really see ambiguity at the core of creative work.
Kelly Schmutte: Anytime you're coming up with an idea and you want to come up with something that's new to the world, you have to wrestle with and be in this sometimes uncomfortable space
Kelly Schmutte: of multiple right answers, multiple possibilities,
Kelly Schmutte: multiple framings of a problem, multiple ways to solve a problem. And so we wanted to write a book to help people understand ambiguity better
Kelly Schmutte: and think about ways to actually leverage and navigate it in helpful and productive ways.
Kelly Schmutte: And so I think, you know, being a product person and a physical product design person myself, I can definitely say that I've wrestled a ton with ambiguity.
Kelly Schmutte: certainly with perfect fit, with other hard goods that I've worked on in teaching, and that it is essential to go to this place of not knowing of being
Kevin Mako: able to hold multiple interpretations, multiple ideas in parallel. So before this episode, I made sure to go to the Oxford Dictionary
Kevin Mako: and get a specific definition. And here's what it says. What does it say? Ambiguity is the quality of being open to more than one interpretation.
Kevin Mako: how do you see that definition or how does that play into your definition of the word given that
Kevin Mako: you're one of the world's leading experts on this term definitely one of the world's if not the
Kelly Schmutte: expert on how ambiguity applies to design design i'll take i'll take that yeah not not an expert on
Kelly Schmutte: ambiguity but i'd say an explorer and fellow navigator of people who are curious about about the role
Kelly Schmutte: of ambiguity yeah so i think you know that that definition's right um what's really at the core of it
Kelly Schmutte: is this idea of multiplicity, dualities, being able to hold multiple interpretations at the same
Kelly Schmutte: time. And from, you know, in product development, I really think about that as two pieces.
Kelly Schmutte: So one side is framing or understanding what the problem really is, right? You might come into a
Kelly Schmutte: challenge, you know, be given a design brief that's around designing a better bike mount for a car for designing a better coffee mug, right?
Kelly Schmutte: And it's always useful to step back and say, well, why are you doing that, right? What are the higher level needs behind that? Is this really the right
Kelly Schmutte: problem to be solving? Is there another maybe more impactful problem that you could address?
Kelly Schmutte: And so that's kind of where delving into the messy space of human needs, which there are, you know,
Kelly Schmutte: infinite amount of needs requires, you know, grappling with ambiguity, coming into this
Kelly Schmutte: humility that you might not exactly know the true nature of the problem. And then once you've
Kelly Schmutte: made an initial kind of put a stake in the ground with, here's our point of view, here's what we think the nature of the problem is that we're going after.
Kelly Schmutte: How do you go about solving it, right? So how do you explore what the right answer might be, right solution might be through prototyping, through testing,
Kelly Schmutte: through getting feedback from people and, you know, cyclical that helps inform whether, like,
Kelly Schmutte: is this the right problem to be solving from the get-go? So, you know, both sides, it's just a ton of messiness, right? Of what is the right problem to be solving?
Kelly Schmutte: Again, having that humility to step back and question whether, you know, you really are tackling the right thing from the start.
Kelly Schmutte: And then also the openness to, you know, take the time to explore things that you think might not work, right?
Kelly Schmutte: It's much safer to stay in the space of like, well, we're pretty sure this is going to work. So we're going to, you know, go ahead with producing this.
Kevin Mako: So ambiguity really and holding ambiguity, using ambiguity is really right at the core. It's very helpful to understand the different elements of how ambiguity works.
Kevin Mako: And what I'm really eager to do on the show is to apply it specifically to your product that you
Kevin Mako: worked on and how you went through those challenges, but bringing in some of the academic best practices as well and how that applies to building hardware specifically
Kevin Mako: because so much of this is very relevant, especially in that prototyping phase, which is so critically important.
Kevin Mako: And so if we jump back a little bit, what is some of the academics saying about ambiguity? Where does the human mind go? Yeah.
Kelly Schmutte: And what are we missing? Where's the opportunity there when you open your mind up to some of the concepts that are in your book? So, yeah, it's really interesting, Kevin.
Kelly Schmutte: I mean, definitely our brains are not wired to, like, being in uncertainty, right?
Kelly Schmutte: We've evolved to know that certainty, recognizing patterns, knowing what to expect is going to help us survive, right? Going back to our, you know, caveman days.
Kelly Schmutte: So one study that we talk about in the book was a study where participants were
Kelly Schmutte: being asked to touch different digital rocks. So think about like a video game interface and had different digital rocks in front of them
Kelly Schmutte: and they would touch one of them and uncover what was underneath. And if it could be nothing
Kelly Schmutte: or it could be a snake, a digital snake, and they received then a very, uh, real electrical shock, like on the back of their hand.
Kelly Schmutte: And they designed this game to kind of keep participants guessing. So sometimes they would let them kind of feel like they were starting
Kelly Schmutte: to recognize like, okay, I get what the pattern is. And then other times they break that, right?
Kelly Schmutte: And what they found was that stress peaked when uncertainty peaked. So it was, you know,
Kelly Schmutte: I think that the headline there is it's more stressful to not know what's coming than to even know something bad is coming. Wow. Yeah.
Kelly Schmutte: So we're not primed to, you know, want to be in this place of not knowing what's what's coming.
Kelly Schmutte: And that's where I think it's, you know, really a muscle that needs to be developed over time. It's a, it's a skill.
Kelly Schmutte: I think it takes a lot of patience of going through many cycles of design, trusting that going to this place is
Kelly Schmutte: ultimately rewarding and, you know, yields good things, these new ideas, but that, yeah, it's uncomfortable. And I, you know,
Kelly Schmutte: even for us as, you know, seasoned designers, I'm sure you could say, like, it
Kevin Mako: still is uncomfortable. It's not that it ever gets easy, but I think there's an understanding with time that and a trust that that something good can come of it.
Kevin Mako: That's powerful. Yeah, yeah. How can you apply that to design a better product, whether you're a designer or whether you're working with a design team or
Kevin Mako: whether you're just in the ideation phase and you're trying to flush out the idea,
Kelly Schmutte: how can you apply some of the principles and the things that you've learned about ambiguity and human nature to improve the design process overall for hardware?
Kelly Schmutte: That's a great question. A headline idea and point of view we came up with in writing the book was seeing
Kelly Schmutte: navigating ambiguity as a balancing act. So there's never going to be the five-step process.
Kelly Schmutte: There's never going to be a cut and dried formula that helps you navigate ambiguity.
Kelly Schmutte: And instead, trusting that you need to be constantly adapting your process,
Kelly Schmutte: considering what the work needs in the moment, as opposed to kind of defaulting to what you've always done, what's always worked in the past.
Kelly Schmutte: And so there's this kind of just being hyper-tuned to and responsiveness to what the
Kelly Schmutte: work needs. At a high level, we kind of break down a difference between acting and adapting. So this is really high level terms, but things, you know, in the acting camp
Kelly Schmutte: are taking purposeful initiative, right? What are the things we can do? What are the tools that we can apply all of our engineering skills, prototyping, testing,
Kelly Schmutte: ethnographic research, the things that we know that we can apply and help us yield results. And on the other hand, adapting. So being open,
Kelly Schmutte: not just being responsive to what gust of wind might come and knock your sailboat over and how
Kelly Schmutte: you have to shift, but really actively working to kind of hold open the set of the set of possibilities, right, to be able to, you know, maybe it means for a stretch, you're
Kelly Schmutte: prototyping multiple things in parallel, right? Rather than putting kind of all your eggs in one basket and
Kelly Schmutte: continuing to like do this, that that you're actively, you know, prototyping multiple ideas in
Kelly Schmutte: parallel. So at a high level, right, thinking about when's a moment when, okay, applying a tool
Kevin Mako: using my past knowledge is going to help me versus, you know, when is a time maybe I need to step back, consider what the work needs, adapt our process, and
Kevin Mako: do something different. Let's pull on the thread of prototyping a bit more. You obviously went through a lot of that in building your product perfect fit.
Kelly Schmutte: How have you seen being ambiguous, exploring different adoptions and prototyping, how did that add value to making a better product and, of course,
Kelly Schmutte: a better business as a result of it. Yeah, sure, sure. So I want to set up a little bit what a
Kelly Schmutte: point shoe is, help listeners kind of visualize what this is. So it's a special type of dance
Kelly Schmutte: shoe that allows ballet dancers to stand really on the tips of their toes.
Kelly Schmutte: It's not at all like a soft ballet slipper or a sock. They're actually quite rigid. When you go to stand on point,
Kelly Schmutte: we were we were not designed as humans to stand this way and so it's a lot of force applied over a really really small area and so my basic thought and
Kelly Schmutte: question was basic physics pressure equals force over area is there a way when you're standing on point that you could increase the surface area over which
Kelly Schmutte: the force is applied so that you could decrease the pressure so rather than getting pressure buildups at wherever you know like your bunyan area or any other toe is kind of
Kelly Schmutte: taking a lot of the load could you even that out by by filling in that space? I started prototyping with a lot of different materials
Kelly Schmutte: and was doing a lot of early prototypes on myself and on my own feet.
Kelly Schmutte: And pretty early on, came across thermoformable EVA foam as a possible material. I was just like, this is it. This is going to be like the it material.
Kelly Schmutte: It's just so cool. It's going to be this cool crossover application, you know, from this other sports fields, bring a little high tech into, into ballet.
Kelly Schmutte: So I started doing prototypes with it on myself and other dancers. And I really went deep with this foam.
Kelly Schmutte: It really took I to about a year of doing this testing and waiting with dozens of dancers.
Kelly Schmutte: The punchline was like, I think it's better, which was not at all, not at all what I was looking for. You know, I was looking for something that would feel
Kelly Schmutte: transformative in how, what the experience of standing on point and dancing on point felt
Kelly Schmutte: like and so this was like this really hard lesson and kind of falling in love with your prototypes
Kelly Schmutte: seeing something and being like this is going to be the solution and even if you're getting
Kelly Schmutte: initial positive feedback like really just you know putting your eggs in that basket yeah I wasted a lot of time and money and energy
Kelly Schmutte: and in that direction and you know a year into it was like I need to go back to the drawing board you know and consider other things and
Kelly Schmutte: I had overlooked this other material, which is what ultimately came to be used in the product.
Kelly Schmutte: It's a two-part silicone rubber material, polyvinyl siloxane. Kevin, you've got to think about classical ballet studios.
Kelly Schmutte: It's incredibly athletic, but it's in the realm of fine art and a world of aesthetics. And so, you know, I think a big part of, like, I was juggling
Kelly Schmutte: all these things from the actual, you know, mechanical needs around like what is going to be moldable.
Kelly Schmutte: and fill just the spaces, not create too much tightness, those kinds of needs to like cultural
Kelly Schmutte: fit. Is there something that would be accepted in the ballet world?
Kelly Schmutte: And then a third piece was like, I knew I wanted to make something that would be mass customizable that would allow it to scale and
Kelly Schmutte: allow any dance or anywhere to have a custom fit. And so trying to triangulate between all those things is really hard.
Kelly Schmutte: And because of the uncertainty around the sort of cultural fit, I hadn't really done due diligence with prototyping with the silicone material.
Kelly Schmutte: But I kind of switched gears, how I did testing. I went back to dancers just with like a really kind of messy, messy prototype and had them try the silicone in their shoe.
Kelly Schmutte: Like immediately just got different responses from them of, wow, this actually feels really cool. Like I still feel connected to the ground,
Kelly Schmutte: but I don't feel the same pain I feel when I'm standing on point. And so from there, continued to do user testing in a different way. I switched it up.
Kelly Schmutte: and started doing small workshops with dancers, like a dozen dancers at a time, having them all kind of make and mold their shoe inserts at the same time,
Kelly Schmutte: and, you know, was getting great feedback.
Kevin Mako: That way, learning lots of things about instructional design and how to guide people through the process as well.
Kevin Mako: So I think I just, I learned a lot of hard lessons around prototyping. Prototype early, prototype often, never stop prototyping.
Kevin Mako: Some of the takeaways there really to help get through that ambiguity of designing the right solution. Prototyping is so powerful.
Kevin Mako: And prototyping is one of those things, I think, especially as a hardware startup, if it's their first time going through product design and product
Kevin Mako: development, one of the things that I find in ambiguity that is really important for a new startup
Kevin Mako: to understand that isn't in the design world is that part of great design is allowing your designers
Kevin Mako: to explore the unknown, to be experimental, to take one step back so that they can take two steps forward. And that seems to be very much what happened with you.
Kevin Mako: Eventually, you had to take some steps back, back to the drawing board, explore unknowns that you weren't that comfortable with
Kevin Mako: to try and see how your eventual market would react, which inevitably ended up leading to the right
Kevin Mako: solution, even though it was different than what you thought was the unknown solution, which is so powerful this will come up to ambiguity. That's exactly right.
Kevin Mako: So in terms of prototyping,
Kelly Schmutte: what are some of the lessons that you learned that you could apply to startups that are going through the process of doing their first prototype or their first few prototypes.
Kelly Schmutte: What did you learn both from academics in terms of this book and ambiguity, but also in terms of the prototypes that
Kelly Schmutte: you went through that you would help guide a new startup through that process with? You know, one framework we show students around prototyping is seeing the
Kelly Schmutte: function of prototyping change over time. So early on in your process, you should be really be prototyping to learn.
Kelly Schmutte: It's like for inspiration, right? It's almost like, building to think, building to brainstorm, building to generate solutions, right,
Kelly Schmutte: and not being shy about generating lots and lots of ideas. So sort of the ratio between ideas and then the number of people that you're testing with is really high, right?
Kelly Schmutte: So a lot of ideas and showing them to a small number of users. And then you kind of move towards as you're kind of
Kelly Schmutte: honing in on your solution, moving to a phase of really defining the problem, getting into the details, you're starting to test it with more people.
Kelly Schmutte: And then ultimately, gets to a validation phase, right, where you're really doing more beta testing and you're testing it really at scale.
Kelly Schmutte: But seeing how, yeah, the function of prototyping really evolves, a lot of what we teach at the d.school and then product design program is really the value of
Kelly Schmutte: that really early stage prototyping to open up the solution space, be not precious with your
Kelly Schmutte: prototypes, show users multiple prototypes, you know, something we always tell students, like, of course
Kevin Mako: people are going to respond politely and think of nice things to say when you show them your
Kevin Mako: your one shiny thing and ask what they think about it as opposed to throw five things on the table,
Kelly Schmutte: see what they pick up and why, ask them a question about it, you know, let their interest drive how they interact with prototypes.
Kelly Schmutte: Seems like there's a common thread to all this, both what you're teaching and your experience with the shoes. It comes back to feedback. Oh, yeah. Really getting the
Kelly Schmutte: appropriate things in front of people to get good. quality feedback. And of course, then listening to the feedback and trying to reapply it into your
Kelly Schmutte: product. Oh, yeah, for sure. And seeing, you know, seeing that not as, again, validation on checking the box, like, do users like it?
Kelly Schmutte: But really seeing that is like, this is your opportunity to be in this person's mind, to be in their world, to learn from them. What is it about this product that
Kelly Schmutte: is interesting to them? And again, is it something else? Is another idea get sparked from that
Kelly Schmutte: and being open to that, not going in with the script of, you know, I need to ask these five
Kevin Mako: questions about the product. Again, really early, you know, early stage being open, being open to that. And then, of course, as, you know, you get more towards the
Kevin Mako: validation phase, you can get, you can ask those types of questions, but early on, just really staying open. It's hard. It's really
Kevin Mako: hard. You know, when you come in and you're sure this is, this is your horse in the race, this is the one that's going to win. Great insight because it's so important.
Kevin Mako: really no matter what the product is to get feedback, but like you're saying, not just at the end of the road, but as you're going through the process and that early prototyping,
Kevin Mako: the early prototyping is really key. A lot of folks, especially when they're trying to get something to production,
Kevin Mako: which is the goal, especially for a lot of the clients of Mako Design. They really, they know what they want. They know what they want to build.
Kevin Mako: They just want our designers and engineers to design engineer, get through prototyping and get it produced. The reality is you have these magic moments along the way. Oh, yeah.
Kevin Mako: Where you can take even that first rough prototype, start to get a bit of feedback. You can do it confidentially under nondisclosure, whatever else, small focus groups,
Kelly Schmutte: friends and family, whatever you have access to as the inventor or the innovator. And then
Kelly Schmutte: put those lessons into the design so that as you move to your next prototype, not only are you tweaking and refining and perfecting the elements that other people think
Kelly Schmutte: could improve it, you're also implementing some of the feedback, which could really improve the product in ways
Kelly Schmutte: that you didn't foresee as you were developing or as you came up with that original vision. Yeah. Oh, totally. Yeah. I think you nailed it, Kevin.
Kelly Schmutte: It's not a step, a one-time step in the process and a check the box. Like, if you're really leveraging prototyping and user feedback, it's a mindset.
Kelly Schmutte: And it's something that should be prevalent and integrated throughout a design process. So I firmly believe that.
Kevin Mako: Prototyping is still very much part of perfect fit today, you know, in different ways. You know, it might be now thinking about how do we structure an
Kevin Mako: ambassador program and create community and get the word out about perfect fit, but still taking
Kevin Mako: a prototype mindset to that, being open, trying things, trying multiple things in parallel. Yeah, it's a mindset. You got it. It's the only way to live.
Kevin Mako: It seems like there's this overarching theme that you really need to allow your designers and engineers to explore.
Kevin Mako: And I mentioned that earlier on the show, but it's something that we keep seeing on this episode, both academically and from your experience, but with lots of other hardware
Kelly Schmutte: and ventures as well that have highly successful products. You really have to even think about it just in nuts and bolts.
Kelly Schmutte: Your budget, if you think you're going to get to production at a whatever, $100,000
Kelly Schmutte: budget, you need to raise that X,000 dollars for some exploration, for some creativity,
Kevin Mako: for some feedback and not expect that you're going to have a linear path from idea to production. You need some feedback loops in there.
Kevin Mako: If you take the time at the beginning and no time always feels precious, but if you really take that time in the beginning, then it pays up huge at the end, right?
Kevin Mako: If you spend that time to really invest and explore, then it becomes very cost effective in the long run.
Kevin Mako: Yeah, I mean, most people don't realize that the truth is at the end of the day
Kevin Mako: you're investing in a venture that's going to be around for many, many, many years, potentially, right? It could be 100 years if the product's good enough.
Kevin Mako: So the setbacks are difficult. Everybody wants to move in a linear fashion. You really want to every month feel like you've progressed 100% in the right direction.
Kevin Mako: And it's very difficult back to human nature to take a step back. A lot of the times, though, and this comes back to failure theory as well, failure is valuable
Kelly Schmutte: because you learned something not to do. Oh, yeah. Failure is full of lessons and implications. So breaking prototypes is fantastic.
Kelly Schmutte: You're learning what doesn't work so that it doesn't become much costlier down the road. So as you take this time to discover these things,
Kelly Schmutte: know that that time is generally money and time well spent. Those are things where you are really creating value for the long term with a small sacrifice in the short term.
Kelly Schmutte: Yeah, 100%. Yeah.
Kelly Schmutte: In navigating ambiguity, we talk about how, when ocean explorers go down and they're exploring a sunken
Kelly Schmutte: ship or something else on the sea floor and they discover something interesting, they drop
Kelly Schmutte: a pin in kind of the first grid if they've kind of gridded the area that they're going to explore, but they don't come back up right away.
Kelly Schmutte: It's like, no, we're going to keep exploring everything else and all the rest of the
Kevin Mako: grid first. Because you can always come back to the first grid. You can always come back to the first idea, right? So it's not to say ignore your first ideas.
Kevin Mako: Like maybe they are the ones, that you end up going with like that could be like you can put them in a parking lot but they'll be
Kevin Mako: there we'll be there you know so take the time to explore the rest of that landscape a little bit more
Kevin Mako: and use all of your oxygen when you're down there and you know stay in that unknown murky place
Kevin Mako: a little bit longer you just don't know what you might find well that's a great anecdote to finish it off
Kevin Mako: I really appreciate all your insight Kelly thanks again for being on the show and we'll talk soon
Narrator: okay take care thank you 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
Narrator: product to market and turn it into a big success. This podcast series is brought to you by
Narrator: Mako Design + Invent, the original and leading firm in North America to provide global
Narrator: caliber in-to-end physical consumer product development to startups, inventors, and small product business clients.
Narrator: If you're looking for product development help on your invention, head over to MakoDesign.com.
Narrator: That's M-A-K-O Design dot com for a free consultation from one of Mako-designs for design studios from coast to coast.
Narrator: Thanks for listening and see you next time.
Reduce Risk Without Pretending It Is Gone
Turn Product Uncertainty Into a Clear Learning Plan
Unexpected findings are useful when the project is structured to learn from them. Product Startup can help you identify assumptions, define validation steps, and decide what evidence should unlock the next investment.
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