Product Startup Podcast Episode 150: Build Prototypes With Your Design Team

00:00:00 Kevin Mako: Hello, product innovators. Today we learn from past senior industrial designer at Amazon on how to properly work with your product design team and prototyping your invention idea.

00:00:12 Narrator: You're listening to the Product Startup Podcast, the show that helps bring your product idea to life by chatting with successful inventors,

00:00:21 Narrator: product developers, and hardware industry professionals. Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from initial

00:00:30 Narrator: idea to getting your product on store shelves. taking you step by step to build a functional product and scale

00:00:37 Narrator: your product business, hosted by Kevin Mako, one of North America's leading experts on hardware development for small product

00:00:45 Kevin Mako: businesses. Now, onto the show.

00:00:49 Kevin Mako: Welcome back, everyone. Today I'm very excited to introduce Robert Irwin to the show. Robert is currently the lead industrial designer for Origyn Consumer

00:00:55 Kevin Mako: appliances, the division of the multinational company hire. He was the past senior industrial designer at Amazon for their shopping cart products.

00:01:03 Kevin Mako: He's also a fellow lecturer in the design industry. Today, Robert is going to share some valuable knowledge in how inventors startups and

00:01:08 Kevin Mako: small manufacturers can first understand how to manage your product design and prototyping team,

00:01:13 Kevin Mako: then work with them to develop physical prototypes to perfect your product for both manufacturing and the end customer. Now, on to the episode.

00:01:21 Kevin Mako: Hey, Robert, welcome to the show.

00:01:23 Kevin Mako: Hey, Kevin, thanks for having me back. I'm excited to be here to chat. Well, great to have you on again. We had a great

00:01:27 Kevin Mako: conversation last time, going over all sorts of stuff about the product design life cycle, understanding how important it is and tips and tricks around product design.

00:01:35 Kevin Mako: Today, we're going to expand that and talk about three main topics. Leadership EQ, which is really important in working

00:01:41 Kevin Mako: with your design team, whether it's internal or whether it's with a design agency, there's a lot of

00:01:46 Kevin Mako: common threads, understanding your user and then the iterative loop and all these kind of weave together. So we'll get on to all these amazing topics.

00:01:53 Robert Irwin: First and foremost, just give us a quick background of how you to where you are today. So I'm going on almost 18 years now. So I could say it's been quite a

00:02:00 Robert Irwin: circuitous loop of design and operations and product development, user -centered focused things. So all over the map, I've built furniture.

00:02:08 Robert Irwin: I've designed Tiny Helms, was the lead designer for the Amazon dash carts. And now I'm designing vacuum cleaner technologies for Hoover. Just goes to

00:02:16 Robert Irwin: show you the ID profession really can take many places.

00:02:19 Kevin Mako: So very excited to be here and looking forward to it. Amazing breadth of history as well. And you saw some pretty amazing stuff happening at

00:02:25 Kevin Mako: Amazon through some really incredible years there, as well as developing that core technology being the head of design there amongst many, many years of experience.

00:02:33 Kevin Mako: So let's jump into it. Let's talk about leadership EQ. First of all, just to describe the audience, what is that and how does that apply to a design

00:02:41 Robert Irwin: project for a hardware product? Right. I mean, I think this goes perfectly into the iterative loop that we'll talk about later.

00:02:48 Robert Irwin: But for me, to back up for a moment, to really invent and drive a product to fruition for a specific user, you, the leader, or the inventor, or

00:02:57 Robert Irwin: whomever should think through having levels of empathy. And really, there's kind of the five things, five topics within leadership

00:03:05 Robert Irwin: EQ, and that's empathy, social skills, self-awareness, self-regulation, and motivation. Mostly specifically to the research and understanding

00:03:14 Robert Irwin: your user, I think empathy plays a huge role in developing the right product for the right people. And so that may look like something

00:03:23 Robert Irwin: where you're not only just listening to the user and their feedback, but also people involved within your team.

00:03:29 Robert Irwin: I think that when you create a team to develop a product, you hire those people because they have specific expertise in their areas, which come with some caveats that

00:03:38 Robert Irwin: they have sometimes maybe some baggage on how they think things need to be made or created to make a good product. And so as a leader, having that empathy and understanding that

00:03:48 Robert Irwin: will help you guide the product development in much more efficient way and produce the

00:03:53 Kevin Mako: products that are right for the right people. I like how you bring that up looking at it with your design team, not just your user,

00:03:59 Kevin Mako: because a lot of folks, if they're inventing a product or creating an idea or they're a product manager, they think about the end user.

00:04:05 Kevin Mako: This is the customer that we're talking about. And you probably have a lot of empathy for them because you've identified either a pain

00:04:10 Kevin Mako: point that they're having or an opportunity that you can see for this user. You put yourself in the shoes of the user. You imagine somebody using your product.

00:04:17 Kevin Mako: Do you imagine all the things that are happening, the wonderful innovations that you've brought to that person?

00:04:22 Kevin Mako: Take that same frame of thinking, according to what Robert's saying here, and apply it to your design team because you're really dealing with a crew of experts.

00:04:31 Kevin Mako: If you think about the amount of designers and engineers it takes to make a product from that initial idea through to production.

00:04:37 Kevin Mako: You've got visual design, industrial designer, customer researcher, materials engineer, mechanical engineer, tooling engineer.

00:04:45 Kevin Mako: And if you've got electronics, you've got your electronics engineer, PCB designer, firmware designer, manufacturing engineers.

00:04:50 Kevin Mako: So you've got like a handful of people that ideally they're experts in their craft. They're very good at what they do and they work well together.

00:04:56 Kevin Mako: And they're using modern and best practices. With all of that, you've got an incredible amount of talent at your disposal to make a great product.

00:05:05 Kevin Mako: I think what you're saying here is got to be careful as the inventor to, of course, bring your vision

00:05:09 Robert Irwin: to the table, bring the dream to these folks, but also listen to their feedback. Yeah. And Kevin, I think that's a great point.

00:05:16 Robert Irwin: I think there's, again, back to the leadership EQ portion of self-awareness and the regulation of the data that you're collecting for the product.

00:05:25 Robert Irwin: You don't want to over-index on the team wholeheartedly, of course, right? You want to get out and get this thing into the hands of your target users and get feedback.

00:05:34 Robert Irwin: You know, I think that as an example, there may be a feature or an attribute of this new thing that you've identified to be worthy of being

00:05:42 Robert Irwin: in the environment for people to use. you've identified the pain point, so to speak. Now, when you go to build the thing and embed that feature, oftentimes you might not have

00:05:52 Robert Irwin: integrated it in the way that the user might want it integrated. And so compartmentalizing features and functions is a very dangerous approach to product development.

00:06:02 Robert Irwin: And that's where you get into the actual prototyping and getting it out into the field as fast

00:06:06 Kevin Mako: as you possibly can to understand what you did right and what you're not quite heading the bar up at that moment. Well, that's valuable insight.

00:06:14 Kevin Mako: And it comes around to that physical world prototyping. I know you're a big fan of prototyping, obviously any design house or somebody who's been in the design industry

00:06:21 Kevin Mako: for a long time understands the importance, the need for prototyping, not just for showing your real thing and getting all excited because that's the product.

00:06:29 Kevin Mako: And now you can either sell it to investors or end users or whatever else.

00:06:32 Kevin Mako: But more importantly, especially for your design and engineering team, it's using that prototype to gather

00:06:36 Kevin Mako: feedback from multiple different stakeholders as you're talking about, not just the end customer, the end customer, the internal designers, other stakeholders, investors.

00:06:44 Kevin Mako: the inventor, of course, themselves. You've got a number of different inputs here, which comes down

00:06:48 Kevin Mako: to that leadership EQ you're talking about, looking at all these pieces of input and trying to put them together in the best light to actually create the best product.

00:06:56 Robert Irwin: Talk a bit about what you've seen in terms of best practices in prototyping and that feedback loop. Yeah, I think this, as a leader

00:07:04 Robert Irwin: or someone who's driving the product development, you really need to commit to your user. And the reason

00:07:08 Robert Irwin: why I say that is you're going to have internal stakeholders that want it a certain way. But once you

00:07:14 Robert Irwin: you get it out in the field and you have practical data and insights that you've collected from users, you can use that data to effectively change,

00:07:23 Robert Irwin: you know, the direction of the river of the product development, you know, internally to help guide the internal team to show them why they're not

00:07:30 Kevin Mako: quite there yet with the product. That's one way to get into it. The users really are the holy grail at the end of the day.

00:07:37 Kevin Mako: And I like looking at the different stakeholders and understanding, and this comes back to the empathy, understanding really where they shine. As a

00:07:44 Kevin Mako: As the inventor, your job is the visionary and you're also the leader. This is your product, your baby, you're running with this thing.

00:07:51 Kevin Mako: The design team, they are generally focused primarily on technical ability.

00:07:56 Kevin Mako: How do they actually use physics to create this product in a manufacturable way? So that's really their specialization.

00:08:05 Kevin Mako: Your investor is trying to make money. So you have to understand that at some point, they're really looking at the lens of what's the most profitable avenue to money.

00:08:13 Kevin Mako: And depending on the type of investor, it might be short term or long term or there might be some other agenda there. It's important to understand what that is.

00:08:19 Kevin Mako: But really, the holy grail at the end of the day is the end user, because that's the person who's going to be both buying your product and reviewing your

00:08:25 Kevin Mako: product. And that is the person that all of the stakeholders leading up to that point, hopefully you

00:08:31 Kevin Mako: found that perfect balance in between, that everybody's satisfied and the end user loves it. They want to buy it and they rave about the features.

00:08:39 Kevin Mako: Of course, the prototyping process is where you can start to figure out whether or not the theories and all of that stuff that you've put together from

00:08:46 Robert Irwin: your design team and all these various stakeholders make sense to that actual end buyer. Right. Yeah, I think said also in

00:08:53 Robert Irwin: another way, you can't technically solve something as a feature with and expect a non-technical mind

00:09:00 Robert Irwin: to love it out of the gate because your user most of the time is not a very highly technical, making rational decisions on how they use the product.

00:09:08 Robert Irwin: And so getting it into their hands and seeing

00:09:10 Kevin Mako: literally how they're using this thing helps you kind of dismantle your internal biases on how it technically should be solved.

00:09:17 Kevin Mako: I like how you mentioned that in terms of understanding really what the user is wanting at the end of the day and applying it to that feedback loop

00:09:26 Kevin Mako: because there's two things that are happening with a prototype. One, it's does the user like the features? Do they like the product?

00:09:32 Kevin Mako: Is it helping solve the pain point or identify the opportunity? But on the flip side, especially for the engineering team, they're figuring out, can this thing work and be built.

00:09:40 Kevin Mako: Both of those are important. And a lot of the times people aren't looking at either of the two of them or they're looking only at one or the other. But you have to remember,

00:09:48 Kevin Mako: both of these things are required to make a great product. It must be manufacturable in a robust quality, reasonably cost efficient manner.

00:09:55 Kevin Mako: And it must be satisfying to the customers. So they're willing to

00:09:58 Robert Irwin: buy it and then they give you good reviews at the end of the day for how happy they are that they have it, which then feeds the machine to grow. Exactly. Kevin. Yeah.

00:10:06 Robert Irwin: This kind of feeds into the kind of iterative loop scheduling your product development time in such a way that I think one practically outlines for the internal team.

00:10:16 Robert Irwin: We understand that we're not going to get it right out of the gate. And so sometimes what that means is doing practically making cardboard mockups and

00:10:23 Robert Irwin: getting a group of people together. You start very high level, right? You start like, is the size weird? Does it work in your hand? Does it, you know, XYZ?

00:10:31 Robert Irwin: And then you start to kind of distill the more of the nuances of the product as the prototypes become higher fidelity.

00:10:37 Robert Irwin: And so I think a lot of teams get caught up in thinking that they need to make a fully functional thing to get it in front of a customer to get real feedback.

00:10:44 Robert Irwin: In reality, you can compartmentalize the process and break it down into a few constituent parts as you develop it to identify, are you on the right track,

00:10:53 Robert Irwin: at least in a broad sense. And then when you start to converge with higher fidelity prototypes, that second loop, the third

00:11:00 Kevin Mako: loop, you start to dig into more of the details and nuances of, say, the user interface or where the buttons are placed, et cetera, et cetera.

00:11:07 Kevin Mako: We've talked about this a few times on the show. It's the concept of skipping prototype steps. A lot of especially first time product developers of people who this is the first

00:11:17 Kevin Mako: hardware product they've developed, they get this notion that they come up with this great design, which really is the core foundation, any great product.

00:11:23 Kevin Mako: You do have to have really well thought out good quality design, at least to start with. It needs to be a good product.

00:11:29 Kevin Mako: So you've got your digital design and the assumption is, okay, well, let's just make an amazing prototype. And we'll use that both to sell product, to raise investment and to,

00:11:37 Kevin Mako: test it before we go into production. The reality is, unless you're making a fork, it's not going

00:11:43 Kevin Mako: to be likely that putting new technologies together and creating a new product that has new innovations and new features is going to be able to be figured out in one

00:11:53 Kevin Mako: prototype round. A prototype isn't all-encompassing. There's stages to it. And this is what Robert's talking about. There's stages in the

00:11:59 Kevin Mako: early one, rough 3D printed or even hacked together, carved out prototype, something to get the basics

00:12:04 Kevin Mako: of the design that you've got, the theory, the digital theory, translated into something physical to make sure the physical theory is somewhat relevant to the digital theory.

00:12:13 Kevin Mako: But then it expands. As you mentioned, into higher fidelity prototypes from there. You go into figuring out the mechanics from there,

00:12:18 Kevin Mako: and then you go from there and to figure out the fine-tuned detailing. Then you go from there into figuring out the manufacturing. And that's just on the technical side.

00:12:25 Kevin Mako: On the front side, you can use each round of those prototypes to learn from your prospective customers. And this doesn't mean you have to spend

00:12:31 Kevin Mako: big bucks on getting consumer research groups together. This could be a couple friends or a couple

00:12:36 Kevin Mako: people that you think might be relevant, people that you signed a non-disclosure agreement with if you're worried about your intellectual property.

00:12:42 Kevin Mako: So there's ways to do this kind of in a startup or a small business mentality, but you should be using both these tools on the opportunity from the buyer and

00:12:49 Robert Irwin: also the mechanical engineering, how it's going to get made together at each prototype round, iterating from simple to more complex. Yeah, absolutely.

00:12:58 Robert Irwin: This iterative process, and it baffles me how, to your example, how many teams actually do this skipping the iterative process.

00:13:07 Robert Irwin: And for me, this feedback loop that you create and you bake into your process is basically derisking the failure of your product when you launch, right?

00:13:15 Robert Irwin: Why would you not want to touch base with your customers along the way? Take the time to do it so that once you spend all the money, paying for the molds,

00:13:22 Robert Irwin: shipping, supply chain, manufacturing assembly, that's Buku Bucks.

00:13:26 Kevin Mako: So doing all this, you know, research, you're de-risking the failure or successful. of the product on the outset when you launch.

00:13:33 Kevin Mako: We look at it as like a 10 to 1 multiplier. Whatever money you spend today will be one-tenth the cost of the cost of that failure down the road.

00:13:43 Kevin Mako: So if you're in prototyping and it's going to cost you 10 grand to spin up another prototype, that will be a $100,000 mistake down the road if that prototype could have been used

00:13:52 Kevin Mako: either to identify a solution with your customer or they found something that you didn't see, maybe that would be a problem. Or especially from a design.

00:14:00 Kevin Mako: perspective or on the mechanics of it. There's just something that wasn't flushed out enough in the engineering phase to truly understand how it would work.

00:14:09 Robert Irwin: So you have a product that's partially functional when you actually go to production. Far more expensive to solve the problem

00:14:14 Robert Irwin: then than it is to just address the problem early and do it properly. Yeah. And there's one other facets to this development process is it's specifically tailored to

00:14:24 Robert Irwin: the conversation of your target users. And so I've seen so many times people have this great idea and they think that it will

00:14:32 Robert Irwin: solve a problem for X user or X target group. And once you get into the realm of testing,

00:14:39 Robert Irwin: you end up finding out that, oh, this doesn't work for the casual bicyclist that uses this thing from here to there. It's more for the on-the-go mom with three babies.

00:14:48 Robert Irwin: And then what that helps you do is pivot your marketing.

00:14:51 Kevin Mako: It pivoted your perspectives on CMF. There's a huge avenue to go down. Once understand that target user group and understanding which group

00:15:01 Kevin Mako: you should go after. Very valuable insights, Robert.

00:15:04 Robert Irwin: Before I let you go, is there anything else that you'd recommend, especially for an earlier stage company that's going through the hardware development process

00:15:11 Robert Irwin: that you think really helps tilt the odds of success in their favor? It's a big question. I think you need to be okay with failure, but failing often to get to the

00:15:20 Robert Irwin: solution quicker. You know, I think so often that you want to kind of protect the baby that you're making and not break it along the way.

00:15:28 Kevin Mako: But I'll tell you, the more times you break it along the way, the quicker you'll get to an actual product that will last

00:15:34 Kevin Mako: and create something good in the world that you want to see happen. Yeah, that's a brilliant piece of advice. The prototype is always such a magical moment for an inventor,

00:15:43 Kevin Mako: but the engineers, what they really want to do with it is break it. That's where they're learning their best information.

00:15:49 Kevin Mako: Where are the weaknesses that weren't foreseen in the FDA analysis and the CAD software and some of the simulations that

00:15:56 Kevin Mako: ran. Where does the digital technology end and the physical technology start in terms of solving that problem from a technical perspective? So use that prototype.

00:16:06 Kevin Mako: Yes, of course, is an amazing moment in milestone and you can use it in many ways in your business, but also think about it from the engineer's perspective.

00:16:13 Kevin Mako: They want to use that to figure out what's not working. And that's almost more valuable to figure out, especially on the design to manufacturing side, than it is

00:16:22 Robert Irwin: to figure out what is working. You bet. Couldn't agree more. Robert, thanks so much for joining us again. Much appreciated for your words of wisdom and we'll talk soon.

00:16:29 Robert Irwin: Yeah, thanks for having

00:16:30 Narrator: me and appreciate it. Thanks. Take care. See you. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Product Startup Podcast, the show that teaches you what it really takes

00:16:39 Narrator: to bring your product to market and turn it into a big success. This podcast series is brought to you by Mako Design + Invent,

00:16:48 Narrator: the original and leading firm in North America to provide global caliber in -to-end physical consumer

00:16:54 Narrator: product development to startups, inventors, and small product business clients. If you're looking for product development help on your invention, head over to Mako

00:17:03 Narrator: -design.com. That's M-A-K-O Design dot com for a free consultation from one of Mako-designs for

00:17:11 Narrator: design studios from coast to coast. Thanks for listening and see you next time.