In Part 2 of this episode, we ask John questions from our audience about their pain points in the product development process. Questions like: When designing, should you put the customer or the end user first? How do you convince your leadership of the validity of a polarizing design. How do you transfer this product development process to the world of startups? Hear his thoughts on these topics and more.
Or click here to listen to part 1 of this episode, "Defending Polarizing Designs, Defining Visual Brand Language".
In Part 2 of this episode, we ask John questions from our audience about their pain points in the product development process. Questions like: When designing, should you put the customer or the end user first? How do you convince your leadership of the validity of a polarizing design. How do you transfer this product development process to the world of startups? Hear his thoughts on these topics and more.
Or click here to listen to part 1 of this episode, "Defending Polarizing Designs, Defining Visual Brand Language".
You're listening to Different b y Design. I'm Lynnaea Haggard. In our last episode, we talked with John Cunningham, CEO of Ox Tools USA, about Defending Polarizing Designs and Defining Visual Brand Language with the example of his own product development journey in designing and developing a new tape measure for the Ox Tools brand. Now we continue that discussion with questions from our audience about their pain points in the product development process and questions like, when designing, should you put the customer or the e nd u ser first? How do you convince your leadership of the validity of a polarizing design? How do you transfer this product development process to the world of startups? John shares his thoughts on these questions and more in Part 2 of this episode, coming up... In our discussion together, John, we talked a lot about the polarizing effect of your tape measure design and your journey of defending that design and going forward with it because you knew that it was based in research. It was driven by user needs. This is a challenge for so many of us in the design world as leaders or managers of the creative and strategic innovation efforts in our company. We so often receive this pushback or resistance from higher management to ideas that might be a little risky, but with huge opportunity for reward. John, can you tell our audience a little bit about how you approach convincing your executive leadership, management, and the board room about the value of a design that may be polarizing or a little bit scary or bold to embrace?
John:Yeah, I guess there's two things that as an innovator, as a thought leader, as somebody who wants to challenge, being tough, dynamic, and different, a lot of times when you see a first design like a concept car, people will look at a concept car and it's like, oh my God, it's terrible. It's ugly. I can't. It's not going to work. And then you see it again. You see it three times, and then you see it three years from now and it's become the standard or the norm. But that first person who was bold enough to step out of the norm, you're always gonna get criticism. Going back to the management and how you sell them, you know, one of the philosophies that I have is products can't be designed in the boardroom. As a product developer, you can't let your bias get into it saying,"this is what I like". Again, going back to my earlier point, I'm not going to use[the tape measure] eight hours a day. I'm not going to be in 10 degree weather framing a house. So I'm not the user. And I think a lot of times management gets in a way of innovation. Management gets in the way of being able to say,"this is different". They're afraid that if they're different, they may not be able to sell it. Whereas the first person who steps out, yes, you take the risk, but a lot of times you also get the reward of being different and being ahead of the curve. And then in three years time, people will then try to catch up to you. In terms of the financial aspect of it, trying to be a niche person, I think looking at the financials, it's a big market. If you can get 100% of a smaller market, it might be better than 1% of the large market. So a lot of times it comes down to the math of saying, you know, can you make this work? If it's too niche of a product, yes, you're going to have struggles because you're going to have tooling, and a lot of hard costs that go into the product development process that you won't be able to recoup. So there is a balance, but the reality is if you deliver the right product to the customer, 9 times out of 10, your financials are going to work and your sales process gets easier because customers call you. You almost turn the entire sales process upside down. You're not going out there presenting to customers. Your customers are coming to you saying"my customers(the end user) wants to buy this product and I want to buy it from you". So the economics of pricing swing back to the brand. When you have a product that people want and you're different, then you have the economics of better margins. So let me break that down. So I guess 1) getting leadership aligned goes back to good user work. If leadership appreciates the voice of the customer, then your facts will set you free if you can show why the product is designed that way, why the elements are there, what user observation, what user feedback drove that work. Again, sometimes you might have leadership that might not appreciate the process and you have to convince them, but I think in any good product company, leadership has learned over the years that the end user, the customer, is the boss. And as long as you've done your homework, then they should fall in line. I say,"should", but we all know that sometimes the ego gets in the way and arrogance gets in a way. But I think good user work usually will help define why this product looks this way and why it is the right answer. The other part is don't rationalize feedback! A lot of times people will, and I'll be critical- designers will get feedback, and they'll say, well he's not the right user, or, you know, he was using it incorrectly, he was using wet wood, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I have the philosophy that when you get feedback, assume you have a problem until you prove you don't, which kind of gets you to the point of being paranoid and hypercritical, but starting a business, you have to be critical of yourself and you have to take feedback and adjust.
Lynnaea:Speaking of feedback, that's a perfect segue into our next question from our audience about your approach to design research in this project. You talked a lot about doing hands-on observational research with your target users, contractors. What was your approach to using surveys as a design research tool? Was there a place for that in this project?
John:On surveys, I like trying to have at least open-ended comments so that people can say why did they like it. Why did they choose this one? And even though it's tedious, I find reading 400 pieces of feedback either alerts me to something, a trend that I might've missed in my user work, or a concern that somebody has, or just a bias that we have. So on this tape measure example, things like,"I'm not really worried about the design, I'm worried about the durability of the product". So things like durability have to kind of be conveyed in the product design. Things like,"I'm worried about my tools being dirty", which sounds bizarre for contractors, but you know, there were many, many comments about,"Hey, I liked the all black tape measure". Branding wise, we want blue, but the contractor says,"blue is going to get dirty and it's going to look like crap. I'd rather than have the black one so that it always looks good and it doesn't show the dirt". Things like that, I probably wouldn't hang my hat on as an element that I would go with, but it allows me to have some different thoughts. And again, just as I said before, pressure test your hypothesis. So surveys allow you to kind of say, okay, here's something I didn't think of, or here's something that confirms.[Surveys] are not going to be the only tool I use, but it's simply one that I use to kind of reinforce or discover new ideas.
Lynnaea:One of the things we always try to emphasize with clients here at Sundberg-Ferar is the reality that there are always multiple stakeholders involved in every design process, multiple stakeholders that you have to understand their needs and desires and incorporate that into the emotional and functional experience of the product. John, how do you balance the sometimes conflicting goals of customers vs. end users? With the Ox Tool measuring tape for example, you would want to be selling that to big box retailers like a Lowe's or Home Depot. But how do you balance what they're looking for with what contractors actually need?
John:Yeah, no, absolutely, and that's a reality. And probably from my 25 years of getting pounded on the head, um, you can never be a purist. I love to let industrial designers be the purists and I have to be the realist sometimes. Because you do have to consider the customer and go back to competitive benchmarking. I think part of the convincing a customer is being able to understand the give and take of their listing. So for example, Lowe's- I'm going to look at what are the competitive products they have on the shelf today? What are the price points? What are the feature sets that they're offering? What are, what are their competitors? Home Depot- what is home Depot offering? And I start to kind of start framing out, in one quadrant, what is my scope, where can I play? And then I balance the next quadrant of saying,"here's what the user is saying. Here's what the market reality is". So you kind of frame all these quadrants in, and then in the center, you're coming back[to the customer] saying,"okay, the biggest frustration for the user is the fact that the tape only lasts six months". Then I'm going to start feeling out,"well, if I gave you twice as much life, would you pay 50% more?" What are my parameters and how far can I go? For anybody who cooks, all of that is about the recipe. You're putting everything in there, and then at the end, you taste it and say, okay, is going to work. I can charge 20% more because I have these facts that backup why the customer will pay for it.
Lynnaea:And you do, you constantly are challenging yourself and constantly are rethinking the approach. You can't be stubborn. You have to be able to say, yeah, this thing's absolutely worth,$49.99, when every competitive product out there is$9.99. You might be able to get away with that, but you have to constantly challenge your assumptions and then verify your assumptions back to the customer and back to the user. A lot of times big companies don't want to involve the customer. One of the things that I love about a smaller company like Ox is I can sit down with a buyer and I can say,"let me put all the cards on the table". Is it risky? Sure it's risky. Everything's risky in life. But if I sit down and get the buy-in from the customer during the process, then they're bought in. They know where you're going, so it doesn't become a sales pitch. So my advice would be, don't be afraid to get your customer involved in product development. I'm sure that many people will say,"you're wrong, John, you can't do that, there's intellectual property, there's all these other legal rules". But the reality is if you can get their insight and if you can get their parameters and even get their buy-in, you then have that one more ingredient to the recipe to say"when I launch, I will be successful". So we've talked about how to align with your executive leadership in terms of the value of the voice of the customer and the importance of making that King in product development. We've also talked about balancing the needs and desires of your users vs. your customers and all the other stakeholders involved in the design process. I also want to ask a question from our audience relating to the product itself and the design of the product. As a designer, how do you harmonize the sometimes competing criteria of 1)embodying your brand in your product vs. 2) incorporating specific features that have been determined by your research to be a"must-have" for your target segment of users? How do you approach any potential conflicts or trade-offs there?
John:This might be cliche, but think about the solution. Make sure you're working from the solution back. The elements branding, the elements of design can be added, and I don't want to offend anybody, but I think making sure that you solve the problem first and then the design should help compliment or enhance or communicate that solution.
Lynnaea:Is there an example of this that you could share with us today, maybe from the camping stove that you developed as part of your nCamp product portfolio? I know you had talked a little bit about that.
John:Ultimately, the stove started out as a collapsible combustion chamber. So the solution was the combustion chamber and then built around it was the visual look and feel of the product so that it was different. It was unique. It wasn't your father's Coleman stove. So a lot of those things certainly give it the element of,"yes, this is a consistent family and a consistent look". This is something that somebody went the extra mile[to design]. In today's age of copycats and Chinese knockoffs, having something that somebody can look at and say, "I can tell somebody spent the extra time to think about the product, think about the look and think about the functionality and how it all fits together". So I think that's the beauty of design is that when it all comes together, there's a solution. And then there's an emotional feel that gets portrayed into the design.
Lynnaea:There's another area that we haven't talked about yet, but that a lot of our audience is very interested in, and that is, how you translate your product development process that has brought you so much success in the corporate world to your startup endeavors or to a startup in general? What advice could you give?
John:Going from corporate America down to entrepreneur, the same principles can be applied. I went from, you know, million dollar budgets down to no budget, yet the process can still be applied. The, the beauty of a good product development process is that it doesn't have to be expensive and you can spend as much money or as little money, as long as you follow the process.
Lynnaea:Speaking of money, a lot of entrepreneurs and startups see money as a huge barrier to entry in the market with their product. How could you speak to that? Is it a barrier? Is it not a barrier? How big of a role does money play in your overall success as an entrepreneur or startup, and for any startups listening in, what should they be worried about, or not be worried about in terms of bringing a physical product to market?
John:You can't throw money at starting a business. Yes, money helps. But there are so many other things that are more important than money. My, my biggest advice, and again, being critical of the industry, things like InventHelp are probably the last thing you need to be worrying about when you're starting a company. I mean, what you really want to get to is passionate customers. You want to get your product where people are going to respond to the product that are going to be just as passionate about your brand and just as passionate about making you successful. So my advice to anybody is, go slow and it probably goes against every book or everybody that is in the industry, but going fast usually generates big mistakes. And as I said before, Unless you have an unlimited amount of cash, you have to be very precious. You have to be very careful with your cash and make sure you're doing things correctly, but also doing things that are economically beneficial. As much testing and as much user work as you do, you're not going to get it perfect on the first time. So allow yourself enough flexibility to make mistakes. Don't spend all your money on 5,000 pieces. If you get 500 pieces and you sell 500 pieces, life is good, you order more. But if you're wrong and you have to correct, you didn't bet the farm. So that's probably the biggest thing. In corporate America, if we did a product launch, we want to launch with 150,000 pieces. So we had to spend a lot of time and a lot of money getting everything perfect because when you went to go, it was a big bet. It was millions and millions of dollars. As a small company, bet$10,000. Prove it out. Then$20,000, prove it out, and go through this process of learning. And when you do have a mistake, you haven't devastated the company. It was learning. It's part of the process and part of learning. So as an entrepreneur, test and learn. Bet small, learn small. Then when you're ready- you know, we're in year four, and now we're now going through production runs that are now 10,000 pieces because now we have high confidence in the process, high confidence in our suppliers, and have proved it out. But day one I would never have bet a hundred thousand dollars on a new product.
Lynnaea:With the increasing momentum and energy towards designing for a sustainable future across industries. In your opinion, what would it take for the design community and executive leadership in this industry to consider more seriously the effects and the sustainable outcomes of their product design process?
John:Yeah, no, I think it's a great question because I think, um, those who've been in power tools, hand tools, unfortunately we've gone through probably a 15-20 year phase of disposable tools. And maybe it's regulations, but there used to be metal housings. If you could pull out your grandfather's drill, it was Bulletproof. It was something that would last 50 years vs. lasting, you know, 50 days. So I think there's a real element of a resurgence of durability and something that's gonna last long. And you know that has a cost, but I absolutely feel that the next cycle is designing things that will last a generation that can be passed down to the next generation. I think that art is lost. And I do believe that could be a simple innovation, whether it's material selection, whether it's technology. Coming from the power tool side, it always pained me watch how many lithium batteries or how many NiCd batteries a company would go through. And yes, you want to get them recycled, but there's a lot of batteries that we're going through. So the day of having electricity as your source in a generator or a panel,(or now you have it translated over to cordless technology), I'm hoping that the manufacturers- unfortunately, Ox doesn't have the resources[bigger manufacturers] have- but I'm hoping that the bigger companies are thinking about how to make a battery that is much more sustainable than what we have today. But yeah, I do think there is a massive opportunity.
Lynnaea:I want to wrap up our discussion today with any last thoughts and wisdom you have for designers in a corporate setting or entrepreneurs who are trying to build a brand with market winning products.
John:Building a brand in any context is hard. Building a brand as an entrepreneur is extremely hard. So I think for anybody who is an entrepreneur, you can think about the product, but just as important, you also have to think about the brand and how you bring branding to your entrepreneurial endeavor. The more you can have that story about your brand, the story of why you're there- that's magic! People want to root for the underdog. Just that simple thing of telling your story. People talk about the elevator pitch, I go back to that your brand has to have meaning. And meaning isn't"it looks cool", or"I got a cool logo". It's more about the essence. What's the deep down meaning of your brand and are you living it? Are you delivering that every day in everything from the website experience to the customer service experience, to the product experience- are you delivering on your brand promise?
Lynnaea:Thanks so much again for your time today, John, and for answering these questions from our eager listeners, we certainly appreciate your wisdom on all of these subjects and your first- hand experience. Once again, my name is Lynnaea Haggard, and I hope to catch up with you on our next episode of Different by Design.