Product Startup Podcast Episode 165: Iterative Hardware Development

00:00:00 Kevin Mako: Hello, product innovators. Today we learn from a dual-degree Harvard alumni on best practices around iterative physical product development.

00:00:06 Narrator: You're listening to the Product Startup Podcast, a show to learn from top leaders in product development, prototyping, manufacturing, product selling, and everything in between.

00:00:15 Narrator: Hosted by Kevin Mako, the leading expert on product development for physical product startups, sponsored by PTC's two best-in-class 3D CAD product development software solutions,

00:00:23 Narrator: Onshape, and Creo, and produced by Mako Design + Invent, the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services,

00:00:30 Narrator: tailored specifically to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors.

00:00:34 Kevin Mako: Welcome back, everyone. Today, I'm very excited to introduce Kyle Dumont to the show. Kyle spent many years as a hardware developer for iRobot, then got a master's of science

00:00:42 Kevin Mako: and an MBA dual degree at Harvard, then spent out AllSpice, which is a software platform for managing electronic engineering feedback and revision tracking amongst other things.

00:00:51 Kevin Mako: Today, Kyle is going to share some valuable knowledge for inventors, startups, and small manufacturers on what iterative hardware product development is between manufacturing runs,

00:00:58 Kevin Mako: who the product feedback loop stakeholders are and how to collect, organize, prioritize, and execute

00:01:03 Kevin Mako: on that iterative feedback information to ensure the best improvements to your physical consumer product design. Now, on to the episode.

00:01:11 Kyle Dumont: Hi, Kyle. Welcome to the show.

00:01:13 Kevin Mako: Thanks. Thanks for having me. Well, excited to talk today about the iterative design tools and processes around improving your product between each manufacturer.

00:01:21 Kevin Mako: And this is something that's really important to hardware startups, even if it's from the early prototyping phases, early customer feedback,

00:01:27 Kevin Mako: crowdfunding launch, short production run, or even scaling into larger production runs, no longer is hardware making a product that doesn't change for the next 10 years.

00:01:36 Kevin Mako: Nowadays, people are looking to improve their product generally in between almost every manufacturing cycle.

00:01:42 Kevin Mako: So every time you produce, you collect feedback from a variety of sources and you make your product better. Now, there are processes and tools to do that the right way.

00:01:50 Kevin Mako: And that's why I brought Kyle on the show today to talk about how to properly get these different individuals, these different stakeholders to provide for.

00:01:57 Kevin Mako: feedback and how you organize and prepare that feedback to do the best iteration possible, not just any iteration that comes out of your own mind or maybe certain designer's minds.

00:02:06 Kevin Mako: This is really a community approach here, which is absolutely best practice in hardware right now.

00:02:10 Kevin Mako: Before we go too far down that, first of all, congrats, you've raised a multi-million dollar seed round for Allspice, featured in TechCrunch, a bunch of other places.

00:02:19 Kyle Dumont: So congrats on the early success on your scale up yourself. Thanks. It's been quite a journey. It's been a really exciting process. It's awesome to see the team growing.

00:02:27 Kevin Mako: product get out there and start to influence a lot of engineers. Amazing. We'll talk a bit about your background. You've been in the hardware space for over 10 years.

00:02:34 Kyle Dumont: Give us a bit of a high level of where you got to where you are today. Out of my undergrad, Jewett, I did product development, mostly electrical engineering for

00:02:40 Kyle Dumont: seven or eight years. I worked at some bigger companies. I was at I Robot for a while doing product design there.

00:02:47 Kyle Dumont: And I ended up joining a small startup company in the 3D printing industry.

00:02:52 Kyle Dumont: And through those experiences, really felt like I had a pretty good grasp on how. how hardware engineering was done.

00:03:01 Kyle Dumont: And just as you mentioned, Kevin, just saw all the inflexibility that was kind of baked into those processes. I mean, maybe a lot of your listeners going from

00:03:09 Kyle Dumont: a big company to a small company. There I was thinking, here's my opportunity to build something

00:03:14 Kyle Dumont: from the ground up, build a workflow from the ground up that I could use to help my team be nimble and kind of meet demands and meet changing customer requirements or environmental

00:03:22 Kyle Dumont: requirements just felt so hamstrung by what was available in terms of tooling. I entered going from the startup company, knew I wanted to start a business somewhere in the

00:03:32 Kyle Dumont: engineering tools area. I ended up going to back to school. I got my MSN MBA at Harvard. They

00:03:38 Kyle Dumont: have a dual degree program, aptly named the MSNBA program, I believe. It was actually the first year they did it back in 2018 was the beginning of the program. We were the class of

00:03:48 Kyle Dumont: 2020. It was very focused on entrepreneurship. So it was perfect for what I wanted to do. I met my co-founder there, Valentina.

00:03:55 Kyle Dumont: We launched this company, starting when we graduated in 2020, obviously right into the pandemic. So that affected a lot of the way we built the company, a lot of the way we built

00:04:03 Kevin Mako: the product. So amazing. Great backstory. And I'm also an individual that I incorporated macro design while I was also in

00:04:10 Kyle Dumont: school. So congratulations on that, Kyle. Thanks. Yeah, it was a good opportunity to kind of, I guess, maybe lower the risk or

00:04:16 Kyle Dumont: have a bit more of a sandbox environment to kind of build and brainstorm before we went out and launched it full time.

00:04:22 Kevin Mako: in work full time on this thing. That's amazing. And it's become a success. And we'll talk about that

00:04:26 Kevin Mako: more as we go into the episode as well, especially the tools that are available for people in the hardware development space. Let's look big picture at this for a moment.

00:04:35 Kevin Mako: Just talk a bit about what iterative design is between manufacturing runs.

00:04:40 Kyle Dumont: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as I'm sure a lot of you and a lot of your listeners are familiar with, there's that kind of legacy way of doing hardware

00:04:47 Kyle Dumont: design, which is waterfall methodologies. Tends to be rather rigid process where you're planning

00:04:52 Kyle Dumont: out your release is well in advance, usually have long spins in between designs, and the goal

00:04:57 Kyle Dumont: is always that each revision is going to work perfectly or as perfectly as possible. What we're kind of doing is starting to take a little bit of the playbook from software.

00:05:06 Kyle Dumont: Software and engineering has done an amazing job of being able to iterate very quickly and being able to build steps into their workflows that enable them to quickly

00:05:16 Kyle Dumont: gain confidence in new versions of the designs. That's exactly what we're trying to kind of bring into the hardware landscape. So in

00:05:22 Kyle Dumont: between manufacturing runs, it is becoming easier and less expensive for us to get quick turn PCBs, get quick turn assemblies.

00:05:30 Kyle Dumont: With 3D printing and mechanical, it's a lot faster for us to do some low quantity builds, get at least designs in the hands of engineers and hopefully even

00:05:39 Kyle Dumont: users, whether or not we're ready to say, hey, this thing's going out the door, we're ready to ship it. We can at least do those integrations tests, do this

00:05:48 Kyle Dumont: bench top test, you know, whatever we need to do to gain confidence and turn things out the door.

00:05:52 Kyle Dumont: And that's why we looked at software and said, hey, you know, that's kind of the pinnacle of what you can do, at least currently, with iterative designs.

00:06:00 Kyle Dumont: So I'm sure we'll talk a bit more about like what are the things we're pulling in, but that's kind of the high level approach that we take.

00:06:05 Kyle Dumont: One more thing I'll mention is that, you know, this was a drive that I know I saw when I was at the big company and also a startup trying to move quickly.

00:06:12 Kyle Dumont: But cut to the last couple of years during the pandemic, our hands were kind of forced

00:06:16 Kyle Dumont: to do iterative design, especially if you're in electrical engineering and you can't get these parts.

00:06:22 Kyle Dumont: getting a note from a manufacturer saying, hey, we're going to have to shut down supply, you know, shut down assembly unless we can design in this new part in the next two,

00:06:30 Kyle Dumont: three days, maybe you have a week or two weeks. So those kind of legacy processes of like, yeah,

00:06:35 Kyle Dumont: it takes us three weeks to schedule an in-person design review and run all of our export bills and kind of qualify everything to do a new turn.

00:06:42 Kyle Dumont: Like, that clearly cannot apply here. So our hands were

00:06:45 Kevin Mako: kind of forced into this iterative process some ways in the last couple of years. There's so much value in it and there's so many tools that are available right now.

00:06:52 Kevin Mako: I love how you mentioned the fact that it's becoming easier to iterate between designs. There's a ton of technology in both design and

00:06:59 Kevin Mako: manufacturing and the combination of those two that allows you to change the design, effectively improving it between each of those cycles.

00:07:06 Kevin Mako: I'm a huge fan of short run production as well, especially for hardware startups. I talk a lot about it on the show, trying to produce 100 to 500

00:07:14 Kevin Mako: units of a product to get them in the hands of real users so that you can get that feedback. with the intent, purposeful, intentional intent of improving your

00:07:23 Kevin Mako: design before you go to a larger, potentially more expensive, full-scale production run. And you can continue iterating those designs

00:07:31 Kevin Mako: as you go into further and further production runs, especially if you plan out that as part of your development process, as opposed to using that legacy model that you mentioned.

00:07:40 Kevin Mako: I love how you look at it as the waterfall model, because that really is the legacy way of doing it. Trying to really plan out what's going to happen well in advance.

00:07:47 Kevin Mako: That's great if you can spend millions of on consultants and all the sort of market data that might be available to Fortune 500 companies,

00:07:55 Kevin Mako: but that's very impractical as a startup to begin with. And secondary, I think the information is

00:07:59 Kevin Mako: weaker. The information that you get from real users in real time is going to be substantially better than the information you can plan ahead.

00:08:06 Kevin Mako: So why not build the concept of agile development as they do in software into the hardware model now that the tools are available? So to dig into

00:08:14 Kevin Mako: this a bit, Kyle, talk to us a bit about the different stakeholders, because the first thing that everyone thinks of is customer feedback.

00:08:21 Kevin Mako: And of course, it's very important. But there's more stakeholders than just your customer on each iteration of the design.

00:08:26 Kyle Dumont: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, huge part is customer feedback. Engineering qualifications really, really important as well.

00:08:33 Kyle Dumont: It's going to allow having those multiple iterations in between can allow you to do things like significant cost reduction.

00:08:38 Kyle Dumont: There's probably performance improvements that your engineering, your development team is just not going to understand until, you know, they get the parts in

00:08:45 Kyle Dumont: hand, start to play with them. Especially one thing that I've always, really like to do. And, you know, I like to do at my current company is make sure that engineers are

00:08:52 Kyle Dumont: getting in front of customers, at least in videos or recordings and kind of seeing firsthand how

00:08:57 Kyle Dumont: these things are being interacted because it's hard sometimes to understand how to design something when you're in a silo.

00:09:01 Kyle Dumont: But that's all a part of kind of bringing together the different stakeholders in a design. You can have, as part of that process, there's, you know, all the engineering

00:09:09 Kyle Dumont: disciplines really important to make sure everyone's communicating effectively and coming to the

00:09:13 Kyle Dumont: table. Systems engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical, if you have electrical software and

00:09:18 Kyle Dumont: firm where there may be different divisions that all have kind of different roles and responsibility, but making sure that there's kind of a common forum, a common sounding

00:09:25 Kyle Dumont: board that all those teams can come together and talk. It's really important. And then all the way

00:09:29 Kyle Dumont: up to now, then talk procurement, product and project managers, CMs, starting to get contract manufacturers involved.

00:09:35 Kyle Dumont: If they're especially going to be, you know, you're doing anything higher

00:09:38 Kevin Mako: volume or with, you know, significant requirements around assembly and manufacturing. That's amazing. So many different stakeholders. I think that's a big picture here.

00:09:46 Kevin Mako: Like even you as the innovator, the hardware founder, you also are a stakeholder. Investors are also stakeholders. So you've got all these

00:09:54 Kevin Mako: different people, as Kyle mentioned, in addition to those two, you've got the customers, which is, I would argue, the most important. Always focus on that as the number one.

00:10:01 Kevin Mako: A, who are your existing customers and B, who are your potential customers? And looking at that data really clearly to define

00:10:07 Kevin Mako: what some of those improvements that they see are, you know, either improvements of the product of things

00:10:12 Kevin Mako: that aren't working. It also could be opportunities on thing you could add to improve the product overall in terms of marketability or whatever else.

00:10:19 Kevin Mako: So both features and problem reduction. Now, the customer is number one, but you've got all these different people that a lot of the time are

00:10:25 Kevin Mako: overlooked. What are your manufacturers saying? What are the different types of designers and engineers? Visual designers, industrial design, mechanical design.

00:10:33 Kevin Mako: Of course, if you got the electronic side, you've got firmware, software, PCB design, component procurement design. These are multiple

00:10:40 Kevin Mako: different individuals, all that will have ideas about ways to improve the product or ways to prevent problems on the product.

00:10:46 Kevin Mako: All of this sort of stuff has to go into some organized plan. And that, I think, is a huge thing that is missed because most of the time, especially as a

00:10:54 Kevin Mako: hardware startup, even if you're collecting this information, which I would say is step one, at least get the information in the door.

00:10:59 Kevin Mako: If you are collecting the information and you're doing a good job of pulling that together, then the more difficult challenge becomes, well,

00:11:06 Kevin Mako: how do you organize and prioritize and then of course eventually execute on that information? So, Kyle,

00:11:12 Kyle Dumont: talk a bit about that process. Yeah, I'm really glad you mentioned organizing. I know it's maybe not the most exciting thing.

00:11:19 Kyle Dumont: Maybe other people following like Maricondo or something and very, very organizing focus. But it's not always the most exciting or interesting thing for founder, but it is as

00:11:28 Kyle Dumont: a fundamental piece, one of the most important building blocks to get started on. So at the core, what we provide as a service and what is really, really important for

00:11:36 Kyle Dumont: all engineering teams is having some level of revision control. Earlier on, then people really even think,

00:11:42 Kyle Dumont: is necessary. But that's one of the things that the software industry has done so well with GitHub, with GitLab, with BitBucket.

00:11:49 Kyle Dumont: If you've heard of these technologies, it's a mentality that software engineers are using that revision control is really a tool that they can use to tell a story.

00:11:57 Kyle Dumont: And so it's very hard to be able to, you know, collect all the information from all the stakeholders.

00:12:02 Kyle Dumont: If you don't have a process in place for kind of being able to trace that information back to a

00:12:06 Kyle Dumont: particular version or being able to quickly change the design, see what's change in the design,

00:12:10 Kyle Dumont: and then run a review and release this new version of the design quickly and efficiently, but in a controlled manner.

00:12:17 Kyle Dumont: You can have quick and efficient in email, but then, you know, email or a shared network drive or Google Docs.

00:12:23 Kyle Dumont: But I think anybody who's carried that along without significant time spent managing them just understands how it can turn into chaos very, very, very quickly, especially is kind

00:12:33 Kyle Dumont: of the anti-force against iterative design. It's like, okay, if I have to kind of keep these folders up to date and

00:12:40 Kyle Dumont: all this stuff manually, bring these exports manually, that's going to butt right up against like,

00:12:45 Kyle Dumont: hey, I want to cut a new version of this design, release it as quickly as possible manufacturing get my data back. Providing that foundation is key from the beginning.

00:12:52 Kyle Dumont: We have embraced Git, you know, in terms of our product on backend, it's the same technology that GitHub and in GitLab are using the software space.

00:13:01 Kyle Dumont: I kind of give you that baseline, a lot of power, a lot of flexibility in a revision control package. And you're going to get things like a diff, which actually will

00:13:09 Kyle Dumont: allow engineers to take two versions of the design and compare them. Any two versions could be release one, release five, or any of those like kind of micro iterations between

00:13:18 Kyle Dumont: and say, how is the design change from this version and this version? It can be really, really important as a starting place when you're tracing something back.

00:13:25 Kyle Dumont: Like, the LEDs are dimmer now, you know, on our new widget. Like, what happened here? We can go trace it back. Conversely, it's easier to spot maybe dead parts of the design.

00:13:35 Kyle Dumont: Now, like, hey, we had included a Bluetooth module in here initially because is we want a Bluetooth connectivity.

00:13:40 Kyle Dumont: That went away three iterations ago, and so we should probably get rid of this. So kind of exposing all that information so that people can kind of make quick engineering

00:13:48 Kevin Mako: design decisions that can affect customers. That's really powerful. You're basically highlighting the foundation of your information.

00:13:55 Kevin Mako: And that's your version, which makes a ton of sense because all the things that we talked

00:13:58 Kevin Mako: about, you have to tie that feedback loop or that stakeholder feedback back to a particular

00:14:03 Kevin Mako: version, especially if you're iterating quickly or over time, because if you've got multiple versions, let's say even out in the market.

00:14:09 Kevin Mako: So it's years down the road and you've got five different versions. You have to be extremely careful that the information you're getting back is pegged to a specific revision.

00:14:17 Kevin Mako: Otherwise, that's going to confuse the design going forward. So foundationally, I love what you've done, Kyle, on focusing really on revision history.

00:14:25 Kevin Mako: So that's kind of like the bottom of the pyramid here. Then from there, we move on to stakeholder feedback.

00:14:30 Kevin Mako: Now, how does that tie into or what are some of the best practices around tying in the various stakeholders that we talked about into each of those versions so that

00:14:37 Kyle Dumont: you know how to properly iterate to your next version going forward. Definitely. So if the first kind of pillar is revision control organization, the

00:14:45 Kyle Dumont: second one I would say is collaboration. It's do we have the forums, do we have the channels for people to be able, all the stakeholders

00:14:51 Kyle Dumont: to be able to communicate, have the traceability to connect that feedback to designs. And again, not have a Slack channel where that's great for just very quick

00:15:01 Kyle Dumont: feedback in information. You can even create channels to scope things a little bit. But you don't have the traceability. It's not as controlled as a system.

00:15:07 Kyle Dumont: like GitHub or GitLab or now AllSpice Hub, which is our product, is going to give you where we can simultaneously render versions of the design

00:15:16 Kyle Dumont: at any of those iterations, any of those versions, you can click on the design and AllSpice Hub, kind of see what's going on.

00:15:21 Kyle Dumont: If someone's more technically focused, they can look at the schematic, they can look at the PCB

00:15:25 Kyle Dumont: and do fit check in very quickly see, hey, this is the board that I'm, you know, staring at in my hand or vice versa, and then make a comment in we kind of pulled from

00:15:33 Kyle Dumont: when GitHub is called an issue, essentially like a ticket, it may be a bug, it may not be a bug.

00:15:37 Kyle Dumont: or maybe a feature or a new idea or even anything like that, you can kind of grab a part of

00:15:42 Kyle Dumont: the design, link to that design, say, like, hey, this version regressed on this feature we were trying to add or this new customer deliverable that we were supposed to hit.

00:15:51 Kyle Dumont: You can have that traceability. Now, engineering can kind of start to kick off a discussion, oh, that's because this happened.

00:15:57 Kyle Dumont: You know, you can get a whole conversation started there about what was the root cause that, why that happened.

00:16:02 Kyle Dumont: This is all now instantly communicated and instantly documented for you. Think about you have this controlled system now.

00:16:09 Kyle Dumont: Some industries need to provide legally that documentation, but even if not, it's an important

00:16:15 Kyle Dumont: part of the design process when you're going back and understanding why decisions are made.

00:16:18 Kyle Dumont: If that all happens in the same tool and the same revision control tool, you can kind of tie it

00:16:22 Kyle Dumont: all together, you just get that documentation for free, you get the traceability for free and you're opening up these lanes of communication.

00:16:30 Kyle Dumont: So we have this issue ticket tracking tool built in our product, all sorts of cool things you can do it to link to the designs, link to the specific versions of the designs.

00:16:39 Kyle Dumont: But we also pay a lot of attention into integrating that into other tools. I mean, Jira, Confluent, these are important project management tools that companies are using.

00:16:48 Kyle Dumont: So tying all those tools together to make sure that all the stakeholders are now able to kind of communicate and not have specific

00:16:55 Kevin Mako: silos. That's brilliant, because you can pull all this different information from all these different folks and

00:16:59 Kevin Mako: essentially consolidated into one space so that either the project manager or you as the founder,

00:17:04 Kevin Mako: the CEO or the president of your emerging hardware startup company or scaling hardware company

00:17:09 Kevin Mako: can look at this information collectively, which I guess leads to another very important layer, which is, well, how do you prioritize that information?

00:17:16 Kevin Mako: So with what you're talking about, you've essentially created channels through a system that allow all these different pieces of information to come into place.

00:17:23 Kevin Mako: Now, you have customers saying that they want this or that, sometimes conflicting with each other. You've got different stakeholders, whether it's your

00:17:30 Kevin Mako: manufacturer saying they want a certain thing. You've got an investor that's saying they want another

00:17:34 Kevin Mako: thing, at least if you've collected the information and now you've got a centralized place for it, that's good.

00:17:39 Kevin Mako: But the final, arguably most important element of all of this to actually be able to execute is how do you organize it? So what tips and tricks do you offer to figuring out

00:17:48 Kevin Mako: how to kind of organize those pieces of information or prioritize them to figure out how to actually

00:17:53 Kyle Dumont: execute on whatever you think should be the key elements of the next revision? Yeah. So one feature that we have to help with that is we have priority labels, essentially.

00:18:03 Kyle Dumont: You can or anybody can assign labels to a particular issue, you know, tracking the importance of it.

00:18:09 Kyle Dumont: And then the other piece of it comes down to the process. So because you have a tool that's

00:18:16 Kyle Dumont: tracking revisions, that's tracking collaboration, you can essentially have a hosted design review that says, hey, this closes this issue, this issue, this issue, this issue.

00:18:25 Kyle Dumont: Again, issues could be feature requests. It could be customer feedback. It could be, hey, this improvement, etc. What we see

00:18:32 Kyle Dumont: a lot of the times is that, you know, engineers and technical teams are going to start to tag.

00:18:37 Kyle Dumont: Tagging is the concept of basically like taking someone, you can at their name, just like you wouldn't Slack or a lot of other kind of interactive collaboration tools who can just

00:18:44 Kyle Dumont: add their name and say, hey, at this person, I need your approval on this PR. We can get managers involved in that too and say like, yes, I agree, these are the important

00:18:53 Kyle Dumont: issues that were closed here. Hey, this one is missing. What's the deal with that? And, you know, whether or not that does end up kind of making its way in, at least

00:19:02 Kyle Dumont: having that conversation, that point in time right there where you can actually make the decision

00:19:05 Kyle Dumont: of like, this is going into this change, but this is not going into this new origin and kind of

00:19:10 Kyle Dumont: get everybody on the same page so that you don't end up with products and head scratching saying like, well, what happened?

00:19:16 Kyle Dumont: I thought we were fixing the mounting points here. And now all of a sudden it doesn't fit cleanly like we thought it was going to, things like that. So

00:19:24 Kyle Dumont: kind of building that all together gives you that ability to kind of make past, fail criteria

00:19:30 Kevin Mako: on what's going into a revision, what's not going into a revision. Very powerful stuff. And if you're just a hardware startup, but they're getting your first product out to market,

00:19:39 Kevin Mako: right now you're listening to Kyle, give best practices and the top tips for how some very advanced hardware teams that are scaling do feedback and iteration.

00:19:48 Kevin Mako: So even if you aren't building complex processes or multiple types of designs, you can actually take this knowledge and apply it to even your first version of your design.

00:19:57 Kevin Mako: Understand who the stakeholders are. understand what version of the product you're on and then figure out how to prioritize that

00:20:03 Kevin Mako: information. If you're just a home inventor starting out, you could do this on a spreadsheet.

00:20:07 Kevin Mako: Now, of course, as you get more advanced and as you get more serious about your product,

00:20:11 Kevin Mako: especially after it goes to market and you're starting to very carefully plan your next iteration

00:20:16 Kevin Mako: and you want to collect as much information as possible, as well as having it consolidated in

00:20:20 Kevin Mako: one place and organized, it makes a lot of sense to move up the value chain and actually get tools out there to support this.

00:20:26 Kevin Mako: So, Kyle, you've highlighted a bit about what AllSpice does. give a bit of a deeper description of it and how people can actually find out more about AllSpice to

00:20:34 Kyle Dumont: potentially integrate into their future planning of their product brand improvement over time. Absolutely. So AllSpice is the company. Allspice Hub is our primary product.

00:20:42 Kyle Dumont: It is essentially a collaboration platform for primarily electrical engineers to be able to share either internally or externally

00:20:49 Kyle Dumont: their designs, run their revision control and organization, run collaboration. And then the whole other

00:20:55 Kyle Dumont: pillar that we haven't even gotten into, maybe we'll do a follow up segment on this. one to plug this is automation. I mean, the last piece, we really built this whole platform and

00:21:05 Kyle Dumont: process around giving us the foundation to start to build in some pretty neat automation around

00:21:12 Kyle Dumont: can be anything from stock and supply checking for every new revision to running simulations,

00:21:17 Kyle Dumont: to running renderings, to running generating outputs and sending them to manufacturers. All this stuff that in legacy tools are very time consuming, really prohibitive to iterating

00:21:27 Kyle Dumont: on designs, start to build that in. So that's some. exciting stuff that we have coming down the road and we'd be happy to share more in the future.

00:21:33 Kyle Dumont: Very cool. What's the website of AllSpice?

00:21:36 Kyle Dumont: Allspice.io, that's A-L-L-S-P-I-C-E.O. We'll bring you to our primary website and there are links there for all sorts of cool stuff.

00:21:45 Kyle Dumont: We have a monthly, I believe we're trying to even make that more like a biweekly webinar. The next one that's coming up is SVN to get migrations.

00:21:53 Kyle Dumont: A lot of legacy hardware companies are using SVN subversion for revision control. we're talking a bit more technically about how teams can basically move from

00:22:03 Kyle Dumont: SVN to Git, but also just doing more of a deep dive on what Git can mean for hardware design.

00:22:09 Kevin Mako: So definitely check out our webinar series on that. And as always, I'll put the links in the show notes below so anyone can just click through as well.

00:22:16 Kevin Mako: Kyle, thanks so much for all your words of wisdom today on how to iterate in the hardware development process. Thanks, Kevin.

00:22:22 Kevin Mako: Always love talking about this. This has been great. Appreciate it. Take care, Kyle.

00:22:25 Narrator: 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.

00:22:33 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.

00:22:43 Narrator: This show is hosted by Kevin Mako, North America's leading expert on product development for physical product startups.

00:22:48 Narrator: Huge thanks to our sponsors, PTC, and their two best-in-class 3D CAD product development software solutions Onshape and Creo, and Mako Design + Invent.

00:22:56 Narrator: The original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored specifically to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors.

00:23:03 Narrator: Thanks for joining and see you next time.