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Guest: Robert Irwin, Former Lead Industrial Designer at Amazon.
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 Design and Engineering Create a Better Product Together
Robert Irwin explains how industrial design and engineering teams can collaborate around product intent, feasibility, communication, and shared goals. The episode also explores development strategy, industrial design and engineering coordination, expert selection, validation, manufacturing readiness, and commercialization.
Episode transcript
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Kevin Mako: Hello, product innovators. Today we learn from an industrial design leader at Amazon on how to ensure great collaboration between visual designers and product engineers with developing your product.
Narrator: You're listening to the Product Startup Podcast, the show that helps bring your product idea to life by chatting with successful inventors, product developers,
Narrator: manufacturers, and hardware industry professionals. Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from initial idea to getting your product on store shelves.
Narrator: We're taking you step by step to build a functional product and scale your product business. Hosted by Kevin Mako, one of North America's leading experts on hardware development for small product businesses.
Robert Irwin: Now, on to the show. Welcome back, everyone.
Kevin Mako: Today I'm very excited to introduce Robert Irwin to the show. Rob just wrapped up almost three years working at Amazon as a lead industrial designer creating the Amazon shopping cart. Before that, he worked for many years as freelancer with agencies,
Kevin Mako: and a large corporations doing industrial design and leading physical product design teams. Today, Rob's going to share some valuable knowledge in how inventors, startups, and small manufacturers can ensure that your product development goes smoothly and creates the best version of your product
Kevin Mako: by knowing how industrial design and product engineering can best work together. Now on to the episode.
Kevin Mako: Hey, Rob, welcome to the show. Hey, Kevin. Nice to be here. Thanks for having me. Good to have you on. I understand you're in between jobs right now. So you've just recently left Amazon. And now you're spending all this free time brushing up on all this CAD software, you know,
Robert Irwin: the certain software didn't get to use as much while you're there. Yeah, you know, I did use a bit here and there when I was at Amazon. I think the team structure out there required much more than just kind of sitting in CAD
Robert Irwin: and working up form structures and whatnot. But yeah, I am in between jobs. You know, I was the lead industrial designer for the Amazon Dashcart. And it was an amazing, humbling experience working with 80 plus engineers.
Robert Irwin: across algorithms, software,
Robert Irwin: firmware, hardware. So it's been great.
Kevin Mako: And what's your backstory before that? You're obviously, you're a great senior designer. You've been in the game for a long time. So give everyone just a background where you started
Robert Irwin: and how you got to work for the big Amazon. Yeah, you bet. Well, rolling back the pages of time, I think, you know, so I went to the Art Institute of Colorado back in graduated 2005.
Robert Irwin: So I've been practicing professional for about 16 years. I've dabbled in the built environment,
Robert Irwin: starting out with Rocky Mountain Institute, interning in Boulder, to pivoting to starting my own consultancy, where we worked on sustainable
Robert Irwin: initiatives in a product development realm. And so we would do like eco-indicator calculations to, you know,
Robert Irwin: understand product, environmental, products, environmental impacts. And so, you know, we would then, would then redesign the product to make it greener. So that was a lot of fun.
Robert Irwin: After that, I pivoted, pivoted again to exhibit design at the Children's Museum. So I got a lot of hands-on experience with STEM educators and working with them closely to develop exhibits.
Robert Irwin: and then got into consulting again for the last 10 years before I was with Amazon doing a lot of global packaging research, consumer marketing research,
Robert Irwin: a lot of boots on the ground kind of stuff in the field. So it was a really great experience from an industrial design perspective.
Robert Irwin: You know,
Robert Irwin: being, kind of listening to targeted customers and they're hearing their voice,
Robert Irwin: you know, where their pain points are and, you know, unraveling their nascent needs around their challenges to develop products really, really helped me to kind of, you know,
Kevin Mako: become a better designer over time. So, and, you know, fast forward after that, got picked up with Amazon and, you know, the rest has been history.
Kevin Mako: I mean, it's great depth for what we're talking about today, and that's, you know, how do we get visual design working with mechanical designs so that it's great product and production, thinking both
Kevin Mako: about the customer, but also about the technology and how to best practices, putting those together, because you've seen them from an independent freelance designer as well from the agency side,
Kevin Mako: agency design working with lots of customers as well as from the, you know, one of the biggest companies in the world, Amazon,
Kevin Mako: you know, working with huge teams of engineering. So first and foremost, let's just start with a high level overview.
Robert Irwin: What is industrial design, mechanical engineering, design for manufacturing, what's a traditional theory around them? What's the definition of them? Just so that everybody kind of has a baseline understanding of that. Then we'll jump into the best practices after that.
Robert Irwin: Gosh, you know, that's a great question, Kevin. I think, you know, industrial design is the vocation of putting, putting, you know, the customer first,
Robert Irwin: taking their challenges. and, you know, turning those insights into actual physical forms that people use every day in their lives.
Robert Irwin: Historically speaking, industrial design has been around a lot of mass production of goods. I think it still is in that realm, but I think you'll find industrial designers doing tons of work
Kevin Mako: in the social impact realms and the local environments in their neighborhoods. And so it really does span the gamut of, you know, applying.
Kevin Mako: applying,
Kevin Mako: understanding into the physical world.
Kevin Mako: Yeah, that's generally, you know, that's what we always kind of look at is this is the visual design, visual merge with technology. So how do you actually, you just think about it, how do you first sketch and obviously you get into cat and all that sort of stuff?
Kevin Mako: But how do you take that idea from written paper from in your head and actually visualize
Robert Irwin: it, but understanding how you're actually going to build it around it, which then leads into the next thing. And not necessarily in that orders, we'll talk about today.
Robert Irwin: But generally the next phase, or at least the next train of thought, is your mechanical design or mechanical engineering. Sure, yeah, mechanical engineering.
Robert Irwin: I mean, depending on how intense or involved the product is, it would be electrical, it could be all sorts of things.
Robert Irwin: You know, in the consulting world, when I was practicing as the industrial designer within the consulting teams, you know, we brought on board kind of every, everybody at the table at the beginning.
Robert Irwin: So whether that's, for instance, if we're working on a food functional beverage, for instance, for Pepsi or, you know, a curing coffee machine, and we would bring in, you know, the food
Robert Irwin: scientists and the managers of the silos of the teams and workshop these things together. And, you know, that really, it can really help kind of.
Robert Irwin: of formalize the concepts across disciplines very quickly.
Robert Irwin: And then you are able to really amass the people or the teams that you need to drive that product to market. I think, yeah, so that's kind of a little bit of that in a nutshell.
Robert Irwin: As far as mechanical engineering and working with them, once it's out of everyone's brains and kind of on the paper and start working in CAD.
Robert Irwin: I think that there are a couple different approaches when it comes to industrial designers working with mechanical engineers or whomever, any of the engineers out there.
Robert Irwin: And you can either ping pong back and forth ideas, depending on where you're located, if you're remotely or together,
Robert Irwin: you know, this may unfold in different ways.
Robert Irwin: So, for instance,
Robert Irwin: kind of at a high level, just an example, if you develop kind of attributes from what people need, right? And these attributes may be features or functions within the product.
Robert Irwin: And so within these features and functions effectively defines this particular target segment of the population, right, that would buy this product.
Robert Irwin: And so these attributes all have their own defining features and functions.
Kevin Mako: And sometimes you need to break those functions apart because each one of these may require a different vocation, a different team, a different skill set to achieve or even test and prototype.
Kevin Mako: So along the way, you end up finding yourself either sourcing people that you need at the time or bringing on an end-to-end engineer, end-in designer who can
Kevin Mako: really kind of carry that product idea from the nascent idea stage all the way. through to supply chain and driving to market.
Kevin Mako: You know, I think the big key here is it's great. You mentioned this ping pong thing because your industrial design is your visual design. And to be clear, the mechanical engineering is that's when you do, essentially the way that I look at it, that's when the detail work is done.
Kevin Mako: That's where you get down to every little bit and figure out exactly how every little part's going to work together. And the important thing that Rob mentioned here is that it's not exactly a linear path. You mentioned the ping pong method. I want to explore that a bit because that is, that's a thing.
Kevin Mako: can be very useful sometimes. I think a lot of people generally used to look at the industrial design mechanical engineering and they said, well, first the industrial designer figures out, you know, how this thing's going to look, the features it's going to have, essentially, what does a customer want and how do we visualize this?
Kevin Mako: And then it would get passed over some engineers and they would get daunted with the task. So, okay, here's this great thing. Now go build it. And the engineers would look at it and immediately say, that's impossible. So then it would go back, right? And it could be very inefficient to get into that ping pong.
Kevin Mako: method. So I just want to explain a bit further about how you actually look at those two. And I can actually talk about some experience from back design as well, of how, you know, how you want to be
Kevin Mako: very efficient with that back and forth process and understand that it's not always, in fact,
Robert Irwin: regularly. And in fact, in terms of best practices, it's not generally a direct correlation, visual, then engineering. And then, of course, you know, the last step is DFM, which is designed for manufacture, which is when you've done all your engineering and you're ready to do your final
Robert Irwin: tool design and manufacturing spec and all that to actually produce in volume.
Robert Irwin: So essentially, let's call it your step one, two, three. Let's focus on step one and two, Rob, from your experience, because you've worked with a lot of different teams in this, combining industrial and mechanical engineering. What do you see in terms of best practices on those two kind of working together? What are the different methods?
Robert Irwin: Explain what you mentioned in ping pong, explain linear versus circular and then some other tips around that because that could be very helpful. Yeah, absolutely, Kevin.
Robert Irwin: And I think you nailed it right on the head there with sometimes things just can't be made because of, well, physics, right? And when you're designing a product, for instance,
Robert Irwin: in engineering or design has this, you know, fancy form and they, you know, totally works for the user. And he toss it over the fence to the engineering side.
Robert Irwin: They say, well, look, our cameras or some electrical PCB or something needs to be X, Y, Z size. is that's when you start to get into the discussion of what are the tradeoffs, what are our constraints,
Robert Irwin: and what are the impacts to the customer.
Robert Irwin: So the ping pong analogy I used was more of just kind of a more at the brainstorming stage of things because really you're more of diverging with possible ideas and bouncing these possibilities off of each other.
Robert Irwin: I think once you get to begin to convert. on these attributes and similar needs within the form, you know, you start to engage in more of a
Robert Irwin: mechanistic approach to the funneling of these, of the ping pongs, if you will.
Robert Irwin: So, you know, eventually you got to get down to to build a concept, build a prototype. And so,
Robert Irwin: you know, some of the mechanisms, for instance,
Robert Irwin: might be a team raises a risk. They raise a flag around a particular function or feature, and this flag is raised,
Robert Irwin: and then you have team meetings right around this.
Kevin Mako: But oftentimes, you know, you have a cadence with the teams, and you do often do often do kind of weekly touch bases, for instance, depending on how fast you're moving with the product. It may be even daily.
Kevin Mako: So that's kind of one of the, one of the mechanisms is really just team, team communication across, across all the disciplines.
Kevin Mako: You know, I think that there are times when decisions are made that are outside of a vocation, for instance, that needed to be done
Kevin Mako: because of X, Y, Z challenge. And then it gets you into, you get back into a ping pong because you weren't possibly, you know,
Kevin Mako: notified that something was changed from the design side that totally breaks the customer experience.
Kevin Mako: And so, so yeah, so I would say part of the funneling of that ping pong is are the mechanisms of communication across disciplines. I love how you mentioned that, you know, getting the communication line, but something that also kind of triggered me is,
Kevin Mako: you know, in a good way is that, you know, triggered the thoughts is that when you have that ping pong at the very early stages before you even get into the industrial, design. It could be very beneficial.
Kevin Mako: One of the things that we look for, when we're designing, let's say it's a relatively simple new gadget or invention or whatnot, a Mako Design for a client, they generally come to us with the idea. And they're looking for us to make it, get it to
Kevin Mako: production. So one of the first things that happens is very early stage, you want to get at least a rough idea of what you're actually building. And they've figured it out. We think a customer is going to want this thing. A simple example that we can bring forward is let's look at the
Kevin Mako: tri-plunger. It's a better toilet plunger. Triangle-shaped toilet plunger. Very, very simple project for us. No electronics.
Kevin Mako: And, you know, they come with this concept, okay, we should make a better toilet plunger and it'll be triangle-shaped. So you have somewhat understand the customer. Then you can kind of go back and forth just at that idea phase with the engineering
Kevin Mako: and the industrial design department to say, okay, engineering is going to look at it and say, okay, if it's going to be triangle-shaped, here's some suction properties we need, here's some form factor sizes that will be required.
Kevin Mako: Does that, you know, and then the industrial design size says, okay, great. Now, how does I, how do I need my user to actually use this thing or how should this be actually designed in with this new form factor and how is that going to connect to a handle and
Kevin Mako: how are we going to use that suction? Now, this is all happening before the industrial design team even jumps into CAT, which is great because when that ID team actually goes into CAD, they already have an understanding of kind of the customer that they want. The client in our case,
Kevin Mako: the inventor, the ideator, the business owner, the department head, whatever that might be. They've got fairly strong direction on what they think the value is going to be to that end user. Then the engineering side's come in and say, okay, here's how we think it could actually function. Here's the technology underlying that may actually work.
Kevin Mako: Now industrial design, what I always believe, the great industrial design is pulling all those together. So they're going to take the technology. They're going to take the client or the business. They're going to take then the eventual end user and merge it all together.
Kevin Mako: into the first version of a product. So it said, like you said, at some point you actually have to get into it. At that point, then what we want to do is now send it over the fence to engineering, but we don't want to stop that ping pong. We want to make sure that as engineering gets into it and says,
Kevin Mako: okay, here's how we're actually going to find to, and here's how we're going to figure out all these tiny details based on what the industrial design team is designed. Now we want industrial design still to be weighing in to make sure that any changes or modifications or maybe new ideas
Kevin Mako: or maybe issues that are coming up are still being refined back to the business and to the end user to make sure that there's nothing happening. And I believe that if you do all that right, by the time you get to the last phase
Kevin Mako: designed for manufacturing, it's relatively easy at that point because you're now not having to again ping pong, but at a time where it's very expensive to make changes.
Robert Irwin: And when you're trying to now all of a sudden go back and forth and start getting those ideas flowing, that's the wrong time to happen because at that point you should be through all that. We've got technology that works. We have a design that's beautiful that the client's
Robert Irwin: going to love. We have a design altogether that makes for a good business, for our customer, for a client, for their product of business. Now, we just need to engineer it to figure out how to tool it at scale so that it's high quality and a reasonable cost in production.
Robert Irwin: And that really, if you, now obviously that's not a perfect science. Sometimes there's some circular action that happens in there. There's obviously more back and forth. There might be some micro stages to certain pieces. But in essence, that's a really nice compact way to be very efficient
Kevin Mako: with your spend. If you don't have the time or the money to be going back around and around through the whole gamut of processes through all of the teams over and over and over again to get
Kevin Mako: to your final product. It makes it somewhat linear while not losing the idea of having smart thought throughout the process. Right, right. Absolutely, Kevin. I think there is one other kind of
Kevin Mako: angle on on this and you did touch on it a little bit there and you know going back and forth with particular designs and not losing what the customer or how the customer may use the product
Kevin Mako: is very important and and sometimes uh sometimes you got to get those prototypes in front of people as well and and even do uh even if it's just some quick uh quick user testing with uh you know even
Kevin Mako: family for instance to just not even tell them kind of how to use it right and just video yeah you know See where their pain points are. See maybe if there's anything that you might have missed internally and loop that in for a quick iteration.
Kevin Mako: But yeah, I absolutely agree. We also find that it's very helpful in terms of, you know, as you mentioned there, you want to make sure that you're using the prototypes to get that feedback. And then if we're having kind of both sets of teams
Kevin Mako: reviewing that feedback at every stage of the game, it's very helpful that those teams have a little bit of knowledge, I think in each other's department. So if we look at macro industrial designers,
Kevin Mako: they have a tremendous amount of history. They're great visual designers, but all of them have
Robert Irwin: had dozens of products that they have worked very closely on many mechanical elements to get them
Kevin Mako: to production. So industrial design understands, not all, not obviously to the depth of mechanical engineer, but they understand a lot of what goes into it, at least at a high level. They've done a lot of it. They've worked on a number of projects.
Kevin Mako: Conversely, the mechanical engineers, they're not, especially at Mac when we're designing for production. We want modern, sexy, sophisticated products that are essentially changing the world.
Kevin Mako: We want to make sure that the mechanical engineers aren't just specifically looking at function. And they're also considering, well,
Kevin Mako: how is the user going to use it? What is the business behind it? So having a little bit of cross-pollination of each other's tasks, if you have a bigger team, you can actually have a dedicated team member say on the mechanical engineering team you could have an industrial
Kevin Mako: designer sitting on that team if it's a smaller crew maybe it's just one industrial designer one mechanical
Robert Irwin: engineer one dfm engineer for relatively simple product making sure that those individuals have a little bit of knowledge in each other's discipline so that they understand and are respectful but
Robert Irwin: also find opportunities and efficiencies to work well with each other i think that helps a lot yeah Absolutely. It definitely does. Yeah.
Robert Irwin: And a lot of that just comes with experience, right? So it's one of those things where, you know, we notice it, especially because we deal with a lot of startups and a lot
Robert Irwin: of the time they may even have, you know, they might have an electrical engineer on staff and they're working with us for industrial design or whatnot. Well, you know, when you've got seven
Robert Irwin: or eight different people that are required to put that together, you've got a tremendous amount of experience put together that understands many of these different elements. So that, you know, when you've got seven or eight different people that are required to put that together, you've got a tremendous amount of experience put together. So that, you know, that hopefully you can smooth a lot of those things out in between. Whereas if you are strictly an industrial designer,
Robert Irwin: you haven't spent much time on mechanical electrical engineering or working with those folks,
Robert Irwin: you're going to find out there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes that you don't know until you have that experience. So it really helps, you know, be honest with yourself about what your weaknesses are, what your strengths are,
Kevin Mako: and then try and find those who are very complementary in terms of skill set.
Robert Irwin: Yeah, absolutely, Kevin.
Kevin Mako: You know, you're reminding me of some of my time back with Amazon, you know, the out of the gate when I was hired, you know,
Kevin Mako: worked very closely, well, not initially with the larger team of engineers,
Kevin Mako: but over time,
Kevin Mako: the communication grew and grew.
Kevin Mako: And so, you know, at one stage where, you know, you're kind of the, you might be the guy in the corner that's like creating.
Kevin Mako: these fancy drawings and just throwing them on a wall that, you know, over time, I think that that relationship that should be fostered within a, whether it's, you know, within any company
Kevin Mako: and was, from my perspective,
Kevin Mako: is that,
Kevin Mako: you know, you're getting invited to the engineering meetings. You know, you're sitting in even to be a fly on the wall because what may not
Kevin Mako: seem like a small change that's needed to be done for manufacturing could turn into, you know, a big headache on the design side or even the customer if you're not kind of sitting in
Kevin Mako: with them to talk through it. So, yeah. Well, that, you know, it brings back to your earlier comment about how important communication is. More communication is better here. These aren't wasted meetings. They're very core meetings. They're very important meetings because those small details can add up.
Kevin Mako: They can be exponential. It can be showstoppers. And it's very difficult, unlike in, maybe in software and certain elements where you can change a couple lines of code in hardware, especially as you get further down the
Kevin Mako: line, like you're fairly set in your, you know, in your model at that point. If you're ready for, you know, if you've tooled up for production or whatnot, you've already got a certain sunk cost that simply cannot be changed.
Kevin Mako: So it's a lot, a lot more efficient to find those changes early. One of the things I find that really helps with all of this is good project management. Yes.
Kevin Mako: So, you know, and I tell us from first hand experience, many years ago when Mako Design was in infancy, when I was soon out of school, we only had three, four person team, generally one in each discipline.
Kevin Mako: We had an industrial designer, mechanical engineer, electrical engineer, and that was it, right? We, there was nobody kind of centrally managing the projects as a task.
Robert Irwin: So, you know, an industrial designer would generally take on the project as essentially the project lead and then they would bring in the support, the other people to support, but one of the major differences I noticed as a design firm, as we got to the point where we could afford
Robert Irwin: a product strategist, then an actual dedicated project manager that works put that as we were getting all of the experience multiple projects. And then we had different types, you know,
Robert Irwin: different size teams and whatnot that we could put below that, having a central project manager really, really can help smooth, let's say, lubricate both the communication between those folks as well, the efficiency of getting results between those folks. Because the reality with hardware,
Kevin Mako: like anything really, is that every project is unique and they'll never follow the exact same path. Through experience, you will learn some of the more efficient paths, but you do have to have a bit of a,
Kevin Mako: you know, a bit of logic, a bit of kind of oversight above that to really say, okay, well, here's how we need to shift resources or here's how we maybe need to loop, like you said, loop back, do another ping pong round as earlier as opposed to later. And really project managers
Kevin Mako: have been incredible. And now we don't have a project at Mako. I mean, for years, we haven't had a project with Mako that doesn't have a dedicated project manager to oversee the different divisions,
Kevin Mako: even on a relatively simple product. It just makes to go faster, more efficiently. Everybody's happier, better results at the end of the day. So that, I saw that shift from beginning to end and it made a major difference. Right. Absolutely. I think,
Kevin Mako: I would definitely dovetail off of that comment around PMs being on each project or being dedicated, I think the nuances, depending on, you know,
Kevin Mako: the level of technical expertise for a project multiplied by the schedule constraints and the team size, you know, all roll into
Kevin Mako: the necessary or the need for, you know, someone to really be on top of the
Robert Irwin: the, you know,
Kevin Mako: the game of making sure that the team is actually communicating across disciplines
Robert Irwin: and making sure that people are getting together to meet, meet deadlines and talk through these pain points that may be happening. And it really is a talent. Like, good project management. It's one of those things where, you know, it's like movie acting, where people are like,
Kevin Mako: oh, I could probably be a great movie actor in that position. But you don't realize there is a ton, a ton of talent and training that goes into it. There's all these little, nuances that you will never see that they see on a daily basis, let alone the technology underneath it.
Kevin Mako: I mean, all of our projects are managed through quite advanced cloud-based software. So, you know, we have a huge technology component as well as like massive libraries and databases and materials and design language and all that sort of stuff that we can just
Kevin Mako: plop into stuff, let alone all the kind of like training that goes into a great project manager to have to learn how to manage not just all the core talent or the core, let's say,
Kevin Mako: expertise that's required, but managing people because there's a human element to every project. And that project manager, ideally, is somebody different than the project owner, which is
Kevin Mako: generally, in our case, in a case, that would be usually the inventor, right, or the business that's come to us for that, you know, to develop that next thing. Project management is a different
Kevin Mako: task all in itself. So you want the owner to be able to come up with the vision, to understand the customer, to be bringing what they, they're the visionary, right? You want them to be focusing on the thing that they're best at and that somebody else do the thing they're best at.
Kevin Mako: When you get all these people working harmoniously together,
Kevin Mako: that's where really fantastic projects come out. Yeah, Kevin, I'm curious.
Kevin Mako: What's from Mako's side, how involved are some owners or, you know, are there varying degrees with your projects that you see roll out with communication across the teams or
Kevin Mako: just PMs or we, I mean, we purposely keep owners very engaged. I mean, they're busy doing most of the time they're doing their own things. We have a lot of owners that this is their second thing. Like they've got maybe even a full-time job and this is something they're developing on the side.
Kevin Mako: So it's not always that they have the time, but generally at least once or twice,
Kevin Mako: like we have it set twice a week. If they choose to kind of engage, it's up to them. But at a minimum, an absolute minimum on a weekly basis, we are coordinating and collaborating. Because at the end of the day, they're the visionary. They're the ones that came up with us. We want to make sure that we're aligning.
Kevin Mako: very tightly with what their vision is. And we want to make sure that we're not kind of going off the rails, as well as, even more importantly, sometimes is identifying great opportunities. So as our team's coming up with those opportunities, we want to be passing those back
Kevin Mako: across to the owner to say, look, we're either see this problem down the road or we see this great opportunity in terms of the design, the build, whatever else. So when you, but again, it comes back to what you said, communication is key, even if it's just a check-in
Kevin Mako: to say, hey, we're on progress, we're here, things are going well, you'd be surprised, you know, the owner might come up with an idea or conversely, the team might come up with an idea. So almost always, it's not a wasted meeting. A lot happens in a week, especially with us.
Kevin Mako: Like every week, a lot is happening. A lot of design and engineering is going into a project. A lot of things are going on. So there's almost always something to talk about. Also, as the owners developing their business and growing, things are happening on their end, too.
Kevin Mako: So we want to make sure that there is almost excessive communication in all directions. Like you said, between the teams, of course, that are actually designing the product, but also with other stakeholders. If they have an investor on board, we want them being brought in on a regular basis.
Kevin Mako: Obviously, if the owner approves and all that, but we want to make sure that everybody's loving the direction it's going. If we have a customer in mind, we should be coordinating as best as possible to make sure that we're still online with what that customer wants, especially if it's a corporate
Kevin Mako: buyer or whatnot, because sometimes that's some of the best advice you'll get is from your actual buyer themselves. If we're working on a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign and we're doing a test campaign before, we want to get as much data back to our design team
Kevin Mako: as possible to see what can we improve on the design today to make it a better product tomorrow.
Robert Irwin: So it really just all comes back to what you said about fluid communication. It makes great products. And then I would take it one step further, everything that I talked about here,
Robert Irwin: constant and purposeful improvement of your processes. So,
Robert Irwin: Every month, you're continuing to tweak and refine and improve those processes, those communication channels, seeing what's working, what's not working, what are best practices from what other places are doing, and then trying to incorporate that in your model.
Robert Irwin: So you never feel like you've got this perfect process or this perfect system that you're constantly looking from all stakeholders to provide feedback into how that can continually improve. That's how, you know, when you look at design agencies,
Robert Irwin: the ones who are very good who have been around for a long time, that's why they're so good at coming up with great innovations. It's not just because they got, you know, five amazing designers on the team.
Robert Irwin: It's because they have that in combination with processes and history. They combine all this together. And that's where, you know, the tremendous amount, obviously I'm biased in this, but that's where a tremendous amount of value comes back to those startups.
Robert Irwin: That's why you'll notice most hardware startups, almost all hardware startups, don't do their own development in the house.
Robert Irwin: Even if they get funding that are able to afford it, generally that's something that when you're 20, 30, 50 person team, then maybe you can bring the seven or eight or nine people
Kevin Mako: you need to be your visionaries in-house and do all that kind of R&D in-house. And even then, as you know from Amazon and in many other places, even then you're still looking to bring in, you know, fresh talent, fresh ideas, fresh thought, best practices into your internal team.
Kevin Mako: team to make that end product as good as it could possibly be at the very end. Absolutely. No, I definitely agree with you. There's a balance with leveraging external vendors and doing internal work, I think. And, yeah, as a startup,
Kevin Mako: you know, I think it's great that we're all starting to be able to, knock on wood, come back and hang out and do brainstorming sessions together and build on ideas together in person too.
Kevin Mako: I think that, you know, in the shop, when I would go down into the end of the shop at work, you know, there would be engineers in one, you know, in every corner of
Kevin Mako: the lab. And I also did quite a bit of design work and engineering work with the engineers
Robert Irwin: in, in serendipitous ways. You know, for instance, I'd be walking through the lab and, and, you know,
Robert Irwin: the battery engineer would grab me, hey, Rob, come take a look at this what do you think about this or or you know someone working on you know some other part
Kevin Mako: and and so so you know that that information is kind of is nuanced and is a little harder to mechanize but i think it's it also caters to a little bit of like the human side of interaction too
Robert Irwin: with with just with creating innovation with creating new products creating these things that have never existed before so um just had to say a little bit about that too other that's great
Robert Irwin: having the mechanisms. I think that there is a, there's, there's that human element too that it's like when
Kevin Mako: you hire these particular people to do work, you know, they're there together for the mission.
Robert Irwin: They're there to create and design and innovate together. So, yeah, it's got, it's amazing. It's almost kind of a beautiful thing. You look at the projects because, you know, this is six months
Robert Irwin: a year, two years, whatever it might be for depending on the type of complexity, the type of design, whatever else. But it's amazing to see kind of the bond, that human element that you mentioned, it forms over time. It's interesting because on the client's side, you know, they're chatting
Robert Irwin: once or twice a week and they're getting these updates. But you imagine these people are like sitting at their desk or, you know, these days partially at their desk, partially from home, partially in the
Robert Irwin: shop, working with a whole team of folks day in, day out for months and months on end. And at the end of it, coming up with ideally something incredible. It's amazing that, you know, the bond and the
Robert Irwin: camaraderie that happens. And it's, I must. say running a design firm that's one of the best parts yeah it's that human element that team element that is really cool and it's also people who are you know generally they're looking to solve problems
Robert Irwin: they're they're they're trying to make the world a better place they're coming up with good ideas out of bed every day it just gets you out of thought every day let's let's what do we solve in today and uh now i think by and large industrial design for me has been uh you know it's just a great boon
Robert Irwin: into just being working with people and having having a great time and uh and innovating for the world man love it what a great way to end the show rob much appreciated for you having uh for you being on the
Robert Irwin: show if somebody wants to reach out to you what's the what's the easiest way um i can put all the i can put your LinkedIn uh link or whatever else in the in the show notes here as well for everyone yeah absolutely yeah um so i haven't been tweeting much then uh but uh you can catch me on
Robert Irwin: LinkedIn, say hi, drop me a connect.
Robert Irwin: It's just Rob, Robert Irwin. Robert Irwin ID is my kind of the handle. But yeah, it's been great talking with you, Kevin. I appreciate you have me on board.
Narrator: Much appreciate it for your insight, Rob. Take care. All right. See ya. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Product Startup Podcast, the show that teaches you what it really takes to bring
Narrator: your product to market and turn it into a big success. This podcast series is brought to you. by 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. If you're looking for product development help on your invention, head over to Mako-design.com.
Narrator: That's m-a-k-o-design.com for a free consultation from one of Mako Design's Ford Design Studios from coast to coast. Thanks for listening. next time.
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