Product Startup Podcast Episode 182: 2023 Consumer Hardware Trends

00:00:00 Kevin Mako: Hello, product innovators. Today we learn about the latest hardware product development industry trends for design for manufacturing,

00:00:05 Kevin Mako: from a 30-year industry veteran who builds leading CAD software tools and has worked with many hardware

00:00:10 Narrator: product companies. You're listening to the Product Startup Podcast, a show to learn from top leaders in product development,

00:00:15 Narrator: prototyping, manufacturing, product selling, and everything in between. hosted by Kevin Mako, the leading expert on product development for physical product startups,

00:00:23 Narrator: sponsored by PTC's two best in class 3D CAD product development software solutions Onshape and Creo,

00:00:28 Narrator: and produced by Mako Design + Invent, the original firm providing world-class consumer product

00:00:33 Narrator: development services tailored specifically to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors.

00:00:38 Kevin Mako: Welcome back everyone. Today I'm very excited to bring back Brian Thompson to the show. Brian is the head of Creo CAD software at PTC.

00:00:44 Kevin Mako: He spent the first 16 years of his career doing CAD design engineering for hundreds of products. many of which are still in production today,

00:00:51 Kevin Mako: then the last 14 years building CAD software solutions to allow designers to make better hardware products. Today, Brian is going to share some valuable knowledge

00:00:58 Kevin Mako: for inventors, startups, and small manufacturers on what the leading trends are right now for design for manufacturing, so that products can be designed, engineered,

00:01:06 Kevin Mako: prototyped, and manufactured faster, more efficiently, and better quality. Now, on to the episode.

00:01:12 Kevin Mako: Hi, Brian, welcome to the show.

00:01:13 Kevin Mako: It's great to be here again with you, Kevin. Thank you for having me. Well, excited to talk to you again. I know you guys are busy.

00:01:18 Kevin Mako: you just wrapped up LiveWorks, which was a huge success, major conference. I think he had over 5,000 attendees. Yeah, it was just a big deal.

00:01:25 Brian Thompson: Talk a bit about that. And then we'll jump into your background. We estimate we had close to 10,000 total attendees and over 5,000 of them live and in person

00:01:34 Brian Thompson: here in Boston at the Convention Center. Very, very exciting. Customers got, frankly, a fire hose of updated strategy and market trends and so forth.

00:01:42 Kevin Mako: And I know we're going to talk about some of those here today together. That's great. Before we get into the trends that are happening, especially around additive and

00:01:48 Kevin Mako: tools for developing great innovative products more efficiently and more effectively. Just give us a bit

00:01:53 Brian Thompson: of a background. How did you get to where you are today? So I manage PTC's Creocad business, but I come from an engineering background. So I've been at PTC only 14 years.

00:02:02 Brian Thompson: And I say only because most folks that are in a role like mine at PTC have been at PTC over 20 years. But I came from industry. So I spent

00:02:07 Brian Thompson: the first 16 years of my career in industry as a mechanical engineer. I have a mechanical engineering degree and a company science degree.

00:02:14 Brian Thompson: Just loved technical product management and came to PTC as a technical guy that wanted to do more business stuff in product management and grew up as a

00:02:23 Brian Thompson: product manager here at PPC.

00:02:24 Kevin Mako: That's who I am. I've been doing this job now for seven and a half years. Oh, amazing. Great to hear. And obviously a tremendous amount of experience working at all

00:02:33 Kevin Mako: levels of product development from startups all the way through to Fortune 500 product firms. So you get to really see what's happening, especially with LiveWorks.

00:02:40 Kevin Mako: There's a ton of great events and great speakers. I've seen all kinds of great information coming out of there, lots of little nuggets. It's great to hear from you

00:02:47 Kevin Mako: about what some of these real leading edge trends are that are happening right now, mid-20203 and what you see going forward. Let's talk a bit about those.

00:02:56 Brian Thompson: What's happening in the hardware product development world right now? By the way, I failed to mention that the smallest company I worked for had about a million bucks in revenue.

00:03:03 Brian Thompson: Biggest company I worked for before PTC had about $5 billion in revenue. You're right. I have sort of expand the gamut. In any case, trend. So first thing that's

00:03:11 Brian Thompson: really, really interesting is there is a lot of new technology coming into the fold of

00:03:17 Brian Thompson: engineering and design processes that customers are really interested in adopting. But what we've seen

00:03:22 Brian Thompson: from a trend point of view is whether that technology is sort of new simulation technology or that

00:03:27 Brian Thompson: technology is say, I don't know, augmented reality technology or maybe that technology is designed for additive manufacturing technology or something like that.

00:03:35 Brian Thompson: Regardless of what it is, what we're finding is customers are very, very interested in adopting it right there as part of their core

00:03:44 Brian Thompson: product development process. So there's a lot of interest in new technology. So there's a lot of interest in technology, but customers don't seem to be willing to sacrifice design

00:03:51 Brian Thompson: process efficiency in order to adopt it. And that's actually going to be an interesting trend throughout a whole conversation

00:03:56 Brian Thompson: today. So great news for product developers is that there is like a reinvestment and a reinvigoration

00:04:02 Brian Thompson: of technology for the entire ecosystem product development, whether you're at a small company

00:04:06 Brian Thompson: that's just a startup or even a big enterprise company, these new technologies that are coming into the forefront here, particularly like in additive as a great example.

00:04:14 Brian Thompson: They're being used by small companies, big companies, media side companies, and there's just a ton of activity investment

00:04:19 Brian Thompson: there. But customers are less and less willing to sacrifice design process efficiency to take advantage

00:04:24 Kevin Mako: of them, which I find really fascinating and I think good for the whole ecosystem. It's nice to see that you mentioned there that people are picking up things more than ever.

00:04:33 Kevin Mako: And I mean, there's a huge emergence of AI and chat GPT and all of this sort of stuff where people outside of the design world all over the place are seeing major advantages and

00:04:41 Kevin Mako: assistance via new technology. So a lot of folks, especially in the design world, are keeping their ear to the ground and understanding that these technologies can have real

00:04:49 Kevin Mako: benefit. Us as a design firm, we are required to be leading edge. We always have to be trying

00:04:53 Kevin Mako: and testing new technologies to give the best results to a whole variety of clients, especially in

00:04:58 Kevin Mako: the hardware startup space as they're trying to be very competitive, make the best product,

00:05:01 Kevin Mako: but also be doing it efficiently and also doing things at a very high quality without having big budgets and short time frame. So that's startup product development.

00:05:10 Kevin Mako: So it's forced us to always be on the edge of new design trends. But that's not historical. the case in traditional industrial design, especially at big corporate design,

00:05:19 Kevin Mako: a lot of it comes down to original training, original processes. Sometimes it's software that's 15 years old. This sort of stuff that

00:05:26 Kevin Mako: really isn't applicable to modern day development. Really, it hurts the product at the end of the day because you're missing out on some of these amazing benefits.

00:05:33 Kevin Mako: So it's really interesting that you're seeing that more and more traditional development is starting to come up to pace with new,

00:05:39 Kevin Mako: innovative, progressive technologies across the board. So let's talk a bit about those technologies. What are

00:05:44 Kevin Mako: those technologies and what are you seeing really make improvements to how to get a

00:05:48 Brian Thompson: product to manufacturing faster than ever before? That insight's really important, Kevin. And I think it boils down to the competitive dynamic in the markets today.

00:05:56 Brian Thompson: Like, customers can't afford a quality issue with their product when they first go out the door. They can't afford to not be innovative

00:06:03 Brian Thompson: with their product because the competition is strong in all the markets that discrete manufacturers serve. And so they're looking to get more efficient.

00:06:10 Brian Thompson: They're looking to be more agile, more innovative. and frankly, they want to work as efficiently and effectively as possible,

00:06:16 Brian Thompson: regardless of whether they have 5,000 engineers working at the company or 5. They want to. And so oftentimes, this boils down to being a lot more focused

00:06:26 Brian Thompson: on the core design model that the design engineer is delivering as part of the product development process.

00:06:34 Brian Thompson: And so there are a lot of model-based terms in the industry because, as you implied, at a large company, they're going to have like a well-defined process.

00:06:42 Brian Thompson: and an understanding of what it means to be model-based. And it turns out that this is driving

00:06:47 Brian Thompson: a lot of interesting dynamics that are really relevant, even for an audience that has small companies that only have one or two or three engineers, right?

00:06:54 Brian Thompson: But starting at the high level, at the industry level, a couple terms that are really, really important. One is model-based

00:07:00 Brian Thompson: enterprise. Or maybe I should start with model-based definition. It's more fundamental. There's actually an Asmi Y-14.47 definition of this.

00:07:07 Brian Thompson: The big industrial companies have gotten together that said we should have a standard. But really all it means is,

00:07:12 Brian Thompson: that you have a model that doesn't require a 2D drawing so that everything that is there that is required to manufacture that model according to its requirements

00:07:21 Brian Thompson: are there effectively in the model. That's all that model-based definition means you don't need to create a derivative 2D artifact

00:07:28 Brian Thompson: to be able to deliver that part or assembly to its specifications. Everything is embodied in the model.

00:07:34 Brian Thompson: That's basically the layman's definition of model-based definition, but there's an as me, as I said, 1447 definition of it out there.

00:07:40 Brian Thompson: Then expanding that concept out broadly to the entire enterprise, the model-based definition is really just talking about delivering an artifact, whereas model-based enterprise

00:07:49 Brian Thompson: is now speaking about an organization that relies on model-based definition for purposes of commissioning, operating, servicing, everything about delivering

00:07:58 Brian Thompson: a product to the market and even out in services. So those are two really important definitions that ground us, and it can get really, really geeky with process and everything.

00:08:08 Brian Thompson: But the fundamental thing that's interesting, I think, for this audience, is that we're now talking about the core artifact that the design engineer creates as part of

00:08:16 Brian Thompson: his or her, their job, and that is the CAD model and delivering everything in that model

00:08:22 Brian Thompson: so that the rest of the organization, whether it's your manufacturing partner or the manufacturing

00:08:26 Brian Thompson: floor you're at or the manufacturing company you're using around the world, delivering everything in that CAD model they can use effectively.

00:08:33 Brian Thompson: And that is a huge time saver for customers big and

00:08:36 Kevin Mako: small. And I think we're here to talk more about what that means actually in the core product development process. Yeah, that's so powerful.

00:08:42 Kevin Mako: And for non-technical listeners out there that are looking at what this means, really the core is your development CAD model, what you're designing

00:08:49 Kevin Mako: should be fully encompassed all the way through to and including manufacturing. And this isn't just manufacturing.

00:08:55 Kevin Mako: This is also the rendering and the visualizations for your marketing materials, all the different types of manufacturing, the prototyping and engineering that goes into that,

00:09:03 Kevin Mako: the digital simulations that are occurring as well as the physical simulations. This is essentially one suite, one tool, one model, which encompasses all of

00:09:11 Kevin Mako: the different elements and really the core to all of this. It all comes down to manufacturing. At the end of the day, if you're designing

00:09:17 Kevin Mako: a product, the most important thing to do for any hard-verse startup is design for manufacturing.

00:09:21 Kevin Mako: If you're coming up with just ideas and visualizations, that's fine. But that's not really true design for manufacturing.

00:09:27 Kevin Mako: That's just kind of vetting out early stage ideation. But if you really want to level up, as you're ideating and developing the product to also be considering the

00:09:34 Kevin Mako: manufacturerability, that just creates tremendous efficiencies throughout the channel, not just efficiencies, but product improvements as well.

00:09:41 Kevin Mako: You're pulling all the different stakeholders to the development of a product, essentially into one package, one platform, one set of tools,

00:09:48 Kevin Mako: one model, as you refer to it in that very specific definition, all encompassing so that every

00:09:54 Kevin Mako: stakeholder can weigh into one design and not have to worry about all these different various

00:09:58 Kevin Mako: shifts from different data points or different software or different tools or other stakeholders or

00:10:03 Kevin Mako: whatever else, that causes a lot of mess, both directly and indirectly in the development process. So the more that you can centralize, the easier it's going to be to get that idea

00:10:10 Brian Thompson: all the way through to and including production and even improving production and all the things that come with post-production as well.

00:10:17 Brian Thompson: Agreed. I mean, let's face it, Kevin, design is an iterative process. You're not going to get it right the first time. But if you're doing it right,

00:10:24 Brian Thompson: as you said, preparing for manufacturing needs to be part of the development process so you can optimize the design for whatever manufacturing process you're targeting.

00:10:32 Brian Thompson: Of course you're going to run maybe structural, thermal, modal CFD simulations on that design. But because design is a narrative process,

00:10:40 Brian Thompson: if you're working on all of those things with the core CAD model and evolving the core CAD model

00:10:46 Brian Thompson: as you go through, staying committed to that, the rate at which you'll be able to do iterations is incredibly fast.

00:10:52 Brian Thompson: Whereas if you leave the core CAD environment to use a separate simulation tool, a separate, say, NC toolbath development tool, maybe a separate tool for designing your injection

00:11:02 Brian Thompson: molds, boy, it can get disjointed very fast and all the time and energy you spend what I call

00:11:09 Brian Thompson: context switching between your core design environment and those other tools is just waste of time.

00:11:15 Brian Thompson: Whereas if you can stay committed to the core CAD model, stay committed to a model-based approach, you can iterate very, very quickly and get to market with something that's

00:11:24 Brian Thompson: frankly even more

00:11:25 Kevin Mako: innovated and as you pointed out, ready for manufacture at the scale you need to be manufactured at. That's great advice. And it's not just time too.

00:11:32 Kevin Mako: It's every time you contact switch in these places, errors can resolve. There's these little micro errors that you don't foresee that

00:11:39 Kevin Mako: happen in data shifts or in stakeholder shifts or whatever the shift is as you shift context around

00:11:45 Kevin Mako: whether it's between different software pieces or whether it's between different stakeholders or whether it's between different versions of models and you've misfired on that.

00:11:52 Kevin Mako: A lot of these indirect or unforeseen errors can start to bubble up. And especially if you do this all away from the beginning, that causes real problems.

00:12:00 Kevin Mako: So one of the things that we advocate at macro design, all we do is design for manufacturing. So we work with primarily startups that are looking

00:12:05 Kevin Mako: to develop products that they're going to produce. So obviously you have to ideate. But as part of the

00:12:10 Kevin Mako: ideation, build it in the actual software, build the actual CAD model that you intend to tweak and

00:12:15 Kevin Mako: refine and iterate more and more as you go through engineering and prototyping into prototyping into short run

00:12:21 Kevin Mako: production from short run production to full scale production, use the same CAD model just in more

00:12:25 Kevin Mako: detail. Now, in the beginning, as you're doing concept, you don't need to focus on all the tiny little micro details of manufacturing, but you should have reasonably strong

00:12:33 Kevin Mako: manufacturing logic built into it from the beginning and, of course, surrounded by a CAD model that can support that

00:12:39 Brian Thompson: all the way through to and including manufacturing itself. Yeah, it's good advice. I totally agree. And it's been a huge trend that we've seen in our customer base, large and

00:12:48 Brian Thompson: small, is this recommitment to doing everything in the core native CAD design because competitive dynamics, cost dynamics,

00:12:56 Brian Thompson: manufacturing, all of those things can be improved by staying committed to that core CAD model throughout the entire development process.

00:13:04 Kevin Mako: I think it's a great trend and I'm happy to see the market sort of re-leaning into those kinds of opportunities. Well, talk a bit about Creo too because

00:13:10 Kevin Mako: Creo is doing some amazingly advanced stuff within tying all the different pieces, especially into the CAD model.

00:13:16 Brian Thompson: So just give a bit of an explanation of what's happening now in 2023 with some really advanced tools here around that crew platform. I appreciate the opportunity.

00:13:23 Brian Thompson: And it comes down to responding to what we're seeing happening in this incredible market shift to go back towards model

00:13:30 Brian Thompson: base. We started down the path of delivering world-class simulation in Creo and we partnered with ANCIS four years ago.

00:13:36 Brian Thompson: And that suite of simulation tools has really, really grown incredibly well to the point where we're now shipping native inside Creo, both linear and

00:13:45 Brian Thompson: non-linear ANCIS solvers with Creole. So design engineers can do everything from large deformation, plastic deformation for like

00:13:52 Brian Thompson: snap fits to simple structural analysis, but all using the flagship antist solvers right there in Creole. That's just one example.

00:13:59 Brian Thompson: But I would say more than anything, adding new technologies like anthus-based simulation, like incredible lattice tools for design for manufacturing, we put some crazy

00:14:08 Brian Thompson: lattice tools. I don't know if you've heard this to them. They're called oxetic lattices. There are lattices that actually have a reverse poisons ratio.

00:14:14 Brian Thompson: So the sides go in when you push down. And that's really cool for like energy absorption use cases. So we see these being used in like helmets. In fact,

00:14:22 Brian Thompson: we had a company on our floor at LiveWorks showing off a helmet design that use some lattices inside Creo for energy absorption, wild, wild stuff.

00:14:30 Brian Thompson: Yeah, it's crazy what customers are doing with the technology. And they love, love, love the fact that the design engineers don't have the context which you had access to

00:14:38 Brian Thompson: this technology. There's right there as part of the design tool, thinking about manufacturing

00:14:42 Brian Thompson: ability, thinking about modeling the performance using simulation technologies, and also preparing the design for, say, injection molding using mold tools inside Creo and so forth,

00:14:51 Brian Thompson: where we've also invested. I think more than anything, though, what we've seen is customers being excited that

00:14:56 Brian Thompson: we're committed to making sure they don't have to do this context switching to get their job done.

00:15:00 Brian Thompson: And they're re-investigating things like just simple, like machining tool paths capabilities in Creo. And like it blows people's minds, the type of five-axis stuff we can now do

00:15:09 Brian Thompson: inside Creo and have it completely associated to the

00:15:11 Kevin Mako: of design. It's really, really wild. And so we're excited to see where customers are going to take it over the next several years.

00:15:16 Kevin Mako: I find this is so value, especially for emerging startups or even just any brands that are trying to relatively quickly get a new concept actually into production

00:15:25 Kevin Mako: to the market, especially with additive manufacturing. So instead of spending years coming up with

00:15:30 Kevin Mako: what they think is going to be the absolute holy grail of a product, they look at starting with an MVP

00:15:35 Kevin Mako: or starting with their core innovation or core offering, getting that to market very quickly.

00:15:39 Kevin Mako: Well, what the software allows you to do is right from concept all the way through to engineering

00:15:42 Kevin Mako: and prototyping and testing gets you to short run additive manufacturing extremely fast. So you can get a small sample of units out there, either paid or free or whatever

00:15:51 Kevin Mako: to a sample customer base and then start getting real feedback to be able to iterate that exact same CAD model

00:15:57 Kevin Mako: so that when you're ready to commit the big bucks to say full tooling for a larger production run,

00:16:02 Kevin Mako: you're doing it based on feedback of real customers with the actual product in their hands. So when you put all these things in one software package, you go all the way.

00:16:09 Kevin Mako: from that idea moment through the short run into full scale manufacturing, essentially de-risking every element of the path.

00:16:15 Kevin Mako: And overall, in terms of the whole project, you know, you're almost ensuring the success of the product because now, not only is it your own theories and all the various

00:16:21 Kevin Mako: internal stakeholder theories that go into the ideation and the vision of that short production run,

00:16:26 Brian Thompson: but now you've got real customers giving you the feedback in terms of how that product is really going to nail success in the marketplace. Yeah, it's so true.

00:16:33 Brian Thompson: And I hadn't thought about it in this way, but you made a really important point there that in a CAD package where you can prepare

00:16:38 Brian Thompson: design to be additively manufactured, to be machined, then to be cast or then to be molded or whatever,

00:16:44 Brian Thompson: all in the same CAD package, all associated with the core CAD design, very, very powerful as you scale a new design into production.

00:16:51 Kevin Mako: So I'm really glad you made that point. It's something that we should think more about in talking about the capabilities of Creel, frankly. Well, there's so much

00:16:57 Kevin Mako: too. And that's the power. When you have everything under one roof, when it's a complete end-to-end

00:17:04 Kevin Mako: be able to very efficiently, effectively get those new innovations, those new ideas, even the changes, updates, the feedback, all of that sort of stuff, just rapidly.

00:17:12 Kevin Mako: And that, I think, is the Quartz is something you mentioned. You've highlighted a couple times in today's episode is competition.

00:17:17 Kevin Mako: You want to get to market quickly, efficiently, but never sacrificing quality of the product. You want good quality hardware.

00:17:23 Kevin Mako: You mentioned that too. The market is unforgiving when it comes to quality. Maybe not necessarily features. We don't need all the bells and whistles. That can be

00:17:30 Kevin Mako: determined by the customers for the next release or whatever else. But you can't sacrifice.

00:17:35 Kevin Mako: You've got to build the quality into it from day one and then get to the market, learn their

00:17:39 Kevin Mako: feedback, and then continue making a better and better product to scale your brand, whether there's a startup or whether it's a new innovation for a Fortune 500 product company.

00:17:46 Kevin Mako: All of the advice here is really cross platform. Totally great. Great summary. Brian, much appreciated for you being on the show today.

00:17:53 Kevin Mako: For anyone who wants to learn more about PTC, Creo, Onshape, all the great packages that you guys offer, where can they learn more? Just go to ptc.com. You'll learn all about it.

00:18:03 Kevin Mako: As always, I'll put the links in the show notes below. So anybody who wants to just click through to any of those software packages, click through, take a look.

00:18:09 Kevin Mako: I know there's a number of options as well for free trials or very reduced rate trials, especially if you're a student and you're trying to get into the space.

00:18:16 Kevin Mako: Lots of options there. These guys are really supportive of all that. We've seen this over the years.

00:18:20 Brian Thompson: So thanks as well for PGC for being such a supporter of students and especially startups and

00:18:24 Kevin Mako: emerging companies. Yeah, absolutely glad to do it. Looking forward to getting more and more engagement here. Thanks, Brian.

00:18:29 Kevin Mako: Looking forward to talking to you again soon. Take care of that. Okay. Thanks.

00:18:32 Narrator: Bye-bye. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the product startup podcast. If you found some value in the show, please do us a huge favor and leave us a quick five-star review.

00:18:40 Narrator: If you have any questions, guest suggestions, or anything else, feel free to reach out to us anytime at our email, podcast at MakoDesign.com. That's podcast at MakoDesign.com.

00:18:50 Narrator: This show is hosted by Kevin Mako. North America's leading expert on product development for physical product startups.

00:18:56 Narrator: Huge thanks to our sponsors, PTC, and their two best-in-class 3-D-CAD product development software solutions, Onshape and

00:19:02 Narrator: and Mako Design + Invent, the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored specifically to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors.

00:19:11 Narrator: Thanks for joining and see you next time.