Product Startup Podcast Episode 225: Fix Hardware Communication Silos

00:00:00 Kevin Mako: Hello, product innovators. Today we learn about the importance of compartmentalized communication for proprietary invention development from the founder of a hardware communication software company. This is the Product Startup Podcast, a show to learn from top leaders in hardware product development, prototyping, manufacturing, product selling, and everything in between.

00:00:19 Kevin Mako: Hosted by Kevin Mako, the leading expert on product development for hardware startups. Welcome back, everyone. I'm very excited to introduce John Conafay to the show. John has been in the manufacturing arena since 2014 and before that was a communications and systems specialist for United States Air Force. He has worked with hardware startups and rocket ship companies and everything in between and through that has developed Integrate software to help with hardware

00:00:42 Kevin Mako: Development communication. Today John will share valuable knowledge for inventors, startups, and small manufacturers on why compartmentalizing communication is so important, who the key stakeholders of product development are, and the benefits of having a well-developed information structure for your hardware product. Now, onto the episode. This show is produced by Mako Design, the original firm providing end-to-end consumer product development services tailored specifically

00:01:07 Kevin Mako: To hardware startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Take your product from idea to store shelves at MakoDesign.com. Now, onto the episode. Hey John, welcome to the show.

00:01:20 John Conafay: Hey, Kevin, thanks so much for having me.

00:01:22 Kevin Mako: Well, I appreciate you jumping on the show today to talk about compartmentalization and communication in design. This is something that really, it doesn't get talked about a lot in the design world, whereas you've got a lot of different key pieces to a project and a lot of different key stakeholders.

00:01:37 Kevin Mako: You've got your designers, your investors, maybe people that you're pitching the idea to. So potential customers, and of course your manufacturers, supply chain, potentially outsource designers, in-house and outsourced. Well, how does a product, the CAD files, the actual project files and all that sort of stuff integrate together.

00:01:55 Kevin Mako: And that is really something that is not thought about a lot in the design world. You just send over open access to your particular file, whatever file hierarchy system that you're using. And then all parties basically have all access or no access.

00:02:08 Kevin Mako: Either one might create problems. And this is really something where effective design to go all the way from that ideation through to design, engineering, prototyping, and of course onto manufacturing requires not just good communication, but the right communication at the right time.

00:02:22 Kevin Mako: So John, before we get into all those interesting tips in and around communication and best practices, especially in hardware design, just give us a bit of a backstory of how you got to being the success story that you are today.

00:02:33 John Conafay: Thank you very much for the kind words. But yeah, so early on in my career, straight out of high school, started a record label, which a lot of people don't know about. Fell flat on my face after a few years and realized that I needed a little bit of discipline.

00:02:46 John Conafay: So I went into the air force to get a swift kick in the butt. For all intents and purposes, it worked. Went to school. Found a club called Students for the Exploration and Development of Space which had me fall in love with the space industry and long story short three billion dollar startups later and a few other spectacular companies I found this single common thread in hardware manufacturing

00:03:08 John Conafay: Development specifically that was super super painful and what I'd say internally a lot is I want to eliminate the need for superheroes or empower superheroes to be able to do the things that you need because a lot of these early stage hardware deep tech companies rely on a few people to do all of the procurement all the supply chain all the pulling together bill of materials and

00:03:32 John Conafay: All these things and you're in this funky position where you're working with external contract manufacturers internal uh design engineers uh internal manufacturing engineers and then customer stakeholders in the rear position if you're doing business development and operations which I seem to find myself in very, very often with these companies.

00:03:52 John Conafay: And so the concept of a source of truth, whether it's the integrated master schedule, your requirements, documents, icds or anything was kind of laughable because you would have it all in an enterprise software that was super insular to the company and that you would have to invite people into to see the entire schedule or the entire run of everything.

00:04:11 John Conafay: So if you're building a rocket and you have one company building the turbo pump for your engines are designing it. You don't want them to see the entire plan for everything that you're building. So I saw that problem and started Integrate as a way to solve it.

00:04:26 Kevin Mako: Talk a bit about what Integrate does, because you've learned this stuff from literally rocket scientists, how they do the engineering behind some of the most complex design and engineering projects in the world. And of course, as a result of that, it's very sophisticated processes. So you got to learn from literally some ofthe best. Now you're applying that to early stage hardware startups or anybody in the hardware space that is developing a new proprietary product that does

00:04:51 Kevin Mako: Have, as almost all do, a whole variety of stakeholders, especially at different times throughout the development, manufacturing, launch and scale processes. Yeah, absolutely. And what

00:05:02 John Conafay: We built is to essentially allow anyone from a nine-year-old kid building a perpetual motion machine in their basement all the way through a 50,000 person enterprise building spacecraft for the dod to have a system that actually scales from a data architecture standpoint, but also in this very specific firewalling of information standpoint. Because when you're in your garage

00:05:25 John Conafay: With three people building everything yourselves and ordering from digi-key and all this, you have one set of needs. And you might want schedule, you might want requirements, you may want to bill of materials to start with and just get going.

00:05:36 John Conafay: But then as you scale to a 50 person company, you have to start working with external contractors and your product gets a little bit more sophisticated and you want to be able to communicate with people externally. And then you'll try to, what's an asana or something like this, and then try to extract that information to send to somebody externally.

00:05:54 John Conafay: And then you've lost your source of fruits. You know, you don't, you're not actually working on the exact same thing as one of your contract manufacturers or customers. So you've extracted a piece of your timeline, given it to somebody else to then ingest two weeks later.

00:06:09 John Conafay: And it just kind of mucks everything up and causes the need for all of this weekly, daily, monthly sync meetings that can be a lot of overhead when you're just trying to build. And then when you get to the 50,000-person enterprise level, you really need to firewall things, even internally.

00:06:25 John Conafay: So with Integrate, we built a way, something that starts where the majority of enterprise applications, specifically for planning, stop, which is it builds on a multi-tenant shared tenancy, highly secure architecture that allows you to take your source of truth, whether it's a requirement, a task, a deliverable or an actual object, and then have the permissions

00:06:48 John Conafay: For those pieces of your plan at the object level as opposed to at the account level. So every person can only see what they need to see. And yeah, we're hoping it helps people with this communication aspect.

00:07:00 Kevin Mako: Let's talk about both the costs of not doing this and the opportunities of doing this thing, especially as a hardware startup. There's obviously some key moments in product development, especially we talk about going into manufacturing.

00:07:13 Kevin Mako: It's rarely the case where you just send it to one manufacturer and they just are making your one part and that's it. You probably have a whole different chain of manufacturers working together, possibly coming to one assembly facility, possibly through one or two or three entities that are actually procuring these different things. But the reality is you're going to have a variety of different, just focusing on manufacturing partners, a variety of different companies that you're working with. And the reality

00:07:35 Kevin Mako: Is you don't need to give every single one of those stakeholders full access to the entire company script. So talk about why that is the case, both let's start with some of the pain points. Like what are the problems you see if you just have essentially an open file share to everybody that's within this hardware startup ecosystem? Yeah. So I'm going to back up to a

00:07:56 John Conafay: Little bit of what you said at the beginning, which is what happens if you don't have a system of record like this I see a lot of companies that are building things because it works and that's all of our like safety position but you're essentially doing work at risk in that way uh and what I mean by that is that you don't have decisions documented you don't have the changes made to the document and if a parameter changes you know how did that affect the entire flow

00:08:20 John Conafay: And if you're not tracking that and god forbid something goes wrong on orbit while somebody's driving a car or not driving a car or any number of things that can happen with very complex hardware programs, projects like this.

00:08:34 John Conafay: How do you do a look back? So what we say a lot of the time is if you don't have a system for this process to track everything that's happened, all the decisions made, what was put onto what, taken off of what, all these things, you're doing a lot of work at risk that could really, really hurt later on.

00:08:52 Kevin Mako: No, that's great. I mean, that that's obviously a big one. Keeping it organized, accountable, et cetera, and understanding what is happening throughout the processes, both so that you can look back and so you can look forward. Talk a bit about just confidentiality, because that's a big one when you're dealing with proprietary technology for a new hardware startup, which is typically what most inventions are.

00:09:11 John Conafay: Yeah, absolutely. And this is a very extreme case of why this is important with our dod customer where things are very, very siloed from each other when you are building for good reason for different classification levels.

00:09:23 John Conafay: But on the commercial side, it goes back to the example of building an entire rocket. You know, if you have, I can't think of who the leader in building turbo pump machinery for what gets the rocket engine going is, but if you go to that person and you want them to focus on this, why are you giving them the 90,000 line item ims and bill of materials and design files?

00:09:46 John Conafay: You want them be able to focus on this. So that's why we made the decision for sub-assemblies, projects, tasks, deliverable level permissions so that you can just meet out the smallest amount of information that you do need to give to external stakeholders.

00:10:01 John Conafay: But in the grander scheme of things, that's why we run into so many problems with so many different systems being used. You have a smart sheet for schedule and then jira for your tasking and then still revert to spreadsheets to communicate things via email.

00:10:14 John Conafay: And then, god forbid, you have to go to ftp for highly secure and compliant file transfer. Where you're as if building rockets or motorcycles or whatever else wasn't complicated enough.

00:10:25 John Conafay: You're using seven disparate systems to track all of the things that you need and none of them really allow to firewall properly for IP reasons, for security reasons or other compliance reasons.

00:10:39 Kevin Mako: Let's talk about some of the benefits as well. Like obviously if you now put together a fairly well-oiled machine that is tracking these, siloing the information correctly, allowing the right people at the right time to have access to what they need.

00:10:51 Kevin Mako: I mean, I can think of some benefits here, but obviously you've been doing this for quite a while. I'll be curious to hear what some of the benefits that you see from people who really adopt this style of a kind of modern, very clear, very accountable project management flow for hardware products.

00:11:06 John Conafay: Yeah, one of the biggest things is diminishing the need for overhead. So whether it's a daily stand up, a weekly stand up or a biweekly stand up.

00:11:14 John Conafay: We keep getting this question of okay where are my reports so I can report it at the two week it's like well your reports are kind of your recent activity and your delineation of who you give access to what things are up to date every second of the day so you just receive notifications and everybody has a much more fluid idea of what's going on at any given point because

00:11:40 John Conafay: Is what we see in a lot of programs is this very staccato cadence of, we say it's akin to trying to orchestrate a symphony, except telling all the musicians to go to separate rooms and then sending them text snapshots of music.

00:11:53 John Conafay: You know, with all the modern software out there now, we're hoping that it's much more of a flow than a stop, start, stop, stop or get updates

00:12:05 Kevin Mako: Every now and then.

00:12:06 John Conafay: Inherently, hopefully that reduces risks with teams spread out all over different states and different countries now. And as it has always been in the case of manufacturing, context is everything.

00:12:18 John Conafay: So if you don't see a change or if you aren't notified of a change to a major system right before it goes into production,

00:12:24 Kevin Mako: You have to stop a line.

00:12:26 John Conafay: That could be hundreds of thousands, millions, I don't know about billions, but hundreds of millions a day that's getting screwed up.

00:12:34 Kevin Mako: That's powerful stuff. I'm a huge believer of technology, especially at Mako Design, we can look at all these different projects and the head of design of whatever discipline they're in, the head project manager for that project, the overall project manager, the director of strategy, or even myself can quickly go into the technology and see in real time what is happening with a particular project in a number of different verticals.

00:12:56 Kevin Mako: So I'm a big fan of it just from a managerial perspective, which I think is very important for a lot of the entrepreneurs around product development.

00:13:03 Kevin Mako: And then like you as the entrepreneur now have a complete snapshot of basically everything that's going on in relatively close real time, as soon as people are updating their information, obviously.

00:13:13 Kevin Mako: So this stuff is really powerful, of course, from preventing costs and problems. And everybody likes to provide unnecessary administrative overheads. So it's great that you can kind of reduce unnecessary meetings and all the rest that goes into that.

00:13:24 Kevin Mako: But in addition, you've got a really strong kind of command center almost now for you as either the founder, or at least if you're passing the reins to your director of design or your head designer or head strategist or whatever it is, giving the tools to those managers to be able to do their best work, both in the job that they're doing, but also managing all the subtasks that are happening below them to get your product manufacturing smoothly.

00:13:46 John Conafay: Absolutely.

00:13:47 Kevin Mako: John, before I let you go, just give us a bit of an overview of where people can learn more about Integrate and how that might actually play into their systems.

00:13:55 John Conafay: Yeah, absolutely. We have a very polarizing website, I would say, as a lot of us came out of the music industry. So a lot of that comes through in our brand.

00:14:04 John Conafay: So go to the website, check it out and send us a message whether you love it or hate it. And we'll be happy to hear from you either way.

00:14:12 John Conafay: You know if the website doesn't suffice just reach out and set up a demo with us we're more than happy to show you what we got what's the website name Integrate.

00:14:21 Kevin Mako: Co great no as always I'll put the links below so anyone who's listening through can just click through on whatever player that you're on John thanks again for your words of wisdom today around effective communication and properly communicating to the right people at the right time and giving them the information to best do their jobs John appreciate your time here and we'll talk again soon absolutely thank

00:14:41 John Conafay: Thanks so much, Kevin.

00:14:42 Kevin Mako: Thanks. Take care.

00:14:45 Kevin Mako: 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 hit the like button and subscribe. If you have any questions, guest suggestions or anything else, feel free to reach out to us anytime at our email podcast@MakoDesign.com.

00:15:03 Kevin Mako: This show is hosted by Kevin Mako, North America's leading expert on product development for hardware startups. And the podcast is produced by Mako Design.

00:15:13 Kevin Mako: The original firm providing end-to-end consumer product development services tailored specifically to hardware startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Take your product from idea to store shelves at MakoDesign.com. That's M-A-K-O Design dot com. Thanks for joining and see you again soon.