Archives for "New Product Development"
Two free resources offer a wealth of information for operations, manufacturing and supply chain
Whether your purview is operations, supply chain management, new product development/new product introduction or executive management, you’ll find information you can use in these two well-established—and newly free—resources.
- APICS, the Association of Operations Management, has made its APICS Operations Management Body of Knowledge (OMBOK) Framework available to the public, free of charge, for the first time. As a resource that “builds on more than 50 years of operations management knowledge” to provide an understanding of “the state of operations management today,” it’s clear why anyone working in the field would be interested in the framework. APICS CEO Abe Eshkenazi makes a convincing case for why others might be interested too: “The APICS OMBOK Framework can become an essential reference tool to all businesspeople as supply chain and operations management becomes a more visible function throughout the enterprise.” Learn more in the June 23 APICS news release, or download the APICS OMBOK Framework.
- Aberdeen is offering free access for a year to its research library, the Vault. (Vault access normally costs $995/year.) The offer is being made in conjunction with Eye for Transport, a provider of transportation and logistics information and services. Aberdeen Vault research is organized into categories that span an enterprise’s many functions and offer something for everyone. Manufacturers may be particularly interested in the categories Product Innovation and Engineering, Manufacturing and Supply Chain Management, which include reports like: Lean Operations: Software Strategies for Manufacturing’s New Normal; Manufacturing Operations Management: Capitalizing on the Economic Recovery; and Supplier Quality Management: Seven Tips to Reducing Non Conformances in the Value Chain. Read more about the Aberdeen/Eye for Transport free year of research offer, or sign up for free access to the Aberdeen Research Vault.
Thanks to SupplyChainBrain.com for the tips on these two resources!
Letting nature inspire your product design
If you’re facing a tough design challenge you may want to look to nature to see how millions of years of evolution have addressed a similar problem. Biomimicry (which Marc mentioned in a blog post about tools to help design more environmentally responsible products) is the mimicking of nature to solve engineering or other human problems. The field of robotics in particular has been yielding some very interesting solutions to challenges of locomotion and range of motion. Here are a few of my favorites:
This perching unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) relies on a claw design similar to a small bird, enabling it to perch on vertical surfaces.
The Stickybot mimics a gecko, enabling it to climb smooth vertical surfaces.
This robotic handling system gets a greatly expanded range of motion by mimicking an elephant’s trunk.
With fluid-based muscles, this system mimics the muscle structure of a human.
To learn more about some of these (and other) projects, visit the online home of the Stanford Biomimetics & Dexterous Manipulation Laboratory, which designed the perching UAV and the Stickybot.
Social product development takes product research to the next level
Joe gave some great advice in his series of posts on how to gather and apply useful product feedback. Quirky, a “social product development start-up” that builds and sells consumer products takes it a step further. The company uses crowdsourcing to determine first which products get designed and then which products get manufactured. A recent post on Mashable describes the process:
The community votes on which ones they want to develop and then adds its input on things such as product aesthetics, design, logo, and even its name. The best ideas are then taken by Quirky’s team of engineers and designers and turned into 3D renderings.
The next step is the most important one: the product is then placed on pre-sale, where anyone can buy the product. However, Quirky will only sell something if it hits a minimum number of sale commitments (usually under a thousand). Once that number is reached, the product is made and person who submitted the original idea gets a piece of the revenue pie.
All it takes is $99 to submit a product idea to the Quirky community. If you have a killer product idea (and who doesn’t!)–and the “go it alone” approach isn’t for you–Quirky might be worth a look. (And if you feel like shopping for some interesting products–modular spatula system or iPod nano kickstand, anyone?–Quirky is definitely worth a look!)
3 steps to getting cheap, easy and relevant product feedback (Step 3: Live it)
This is the final installment on how to gather and use relevant product feedback. In an earlier post I laid out this three-step framework:
In Step 1 I offered advice on how to collect good market information, and in Step 2 I described the importance of sharing that information with the rest of your organization.
The premise behind Step 3 is that it’s one thing to have a conceptual understanding of the buyers in your market, but it’s another to walk a mile in their shoes. In order to truly understand your buyers, step away from your desk and go see them in action. If you can, go live a day in the life of your customer.
Step 3: Live it. See what your customers see. Think what they think.
There are a lot of ways to get a better understanding of the buyers in your market. Here are some of my favorite ways to live it:
- Take a field trip. Visit your customers and talk to the people who made the decision to buy your product. Watch them use your product and ask them to articulate the value they get from it.
- Attend the same trade shows and conferences as your buyers, even if you’re not exhibiting. Have casual conversations at lunch or between sessions.
- If applicable, attend your company’s training classes and listen to your new customers’ expectations for your product.
- Create in-person focus groups or advisory boards.
- Cultivate relationships with key customers who are representative of your greater market.
- Perform in-person product testing.
- Give out samples or free trials, observe the behaviors of people who use them and talk to them about their experiences.
- Don’t forget to pick the brains of the subject matter experts in your own organization.
Nothing takes the place of in-person interactions, but as a matter of practicality, we can’t spend every day in the field. Keep up to date by leveraging the web to listen to the conversations in your market. Follow your market’s LinkedIn groups, newsletters, forums, blogs (including the replies!) and industry events.
Listen for the nuances in your buyers’ language and adjust your own to make sure you’re truly speaking to them. Be observant when their problems change and adjust your understanding of what your solution needs to provide. Do this often and make sure you’re feeding any updates back to the rest of your organization.
Soon, you’ll all be looking at your product through the eyes of the customer. The beauty of this approach is that making product decisions ultimately becomes easier. Once you know who you’re building for, you don’t need to guess.
Further reading:
3 steps to getting cheap, easy and relevant product feedback (Step 2: Share it)
In the start of this series, I laid out a framework for gathering and using relevant product feedback:
Gathering the information is the critical first step in the process and it can be very rewarding. It’s great when people validate our ideas and it’s even better when they improve on them.
Collecting this data is important, but it’s still just data. It only becomes valuable product feedback if you actually do something with it. And this brings us to…
Step 2: Share it with your entire organization.
You’ve collected the data, you have some product feedback and you think you know the right thing to do…but people around you aren’t listening. How do you overcome their resistance?
At Arena, everyone knows "Brad," the VP of operations.
The answer: Put it in the voice of the market. Share the information you gathered. Point out trends in the market. Relay the product feedback, highlighting the praises and the criticisms. One of the most effective ways to do this is to give a name and a face to each of the key buyers in your market. This is often referred to as “buyer profiling” or creating a buyer persona. (Note: This is different than creating a user persona.)
Here’s an example of buyer profiling. At Arena, everyone knows “Brad,” the VP of operations. Brad is 44 years old. Brad went to a state school. Brad gets frustrated with engineering. Brad gets fired if his product ships late.
Brad is not a real person.
Brad was created from the aggregation of dozens of conversations, hundreds of survey data points and a lot of product feedback. Through our analysis, we identified his top responsibilities and the main problems he encounters in trying to get his job done. We also gained insight into his personal and professional goals. Further, we learned where he gets his job-related information and what his preferred methods of communication are.
After we created Brad, we introduced him to everybody in our company through a series of presentations, conversations and printed materials. We made sure that each group had the information it needed to make the best decisions about how to serve this key buyer. For marketing, for instance, we made sure the team knew that Brad hates email but trusts his LinkedIn groups. For our developers, we described how Brad is a pretty savvy user (he’d be comfortable approving a change order from his Blackberry) but not a hardcore technophile. We went through our findings with sales, support, training and all of management.
The results have been great.
Now, everybody understands Brad and the problems that we solve for him. We hear it in meetings all the time: “Yes, but would Brad care?”
What happens when times change though? How do you keep up with product feedback in a moving economy?
The answer: Live it.
A product designer on “going it alone”
At a Chinese contract manufacturer, an employee mounts a PCBA in a fixture before soldering a sensor.
In 2003, Adam Hocherman went big and founded a consumer electronics company called American Innovative. With the help of the U.S. government’s SBA loan program, he began turning his ideas into products that were built in China. Hocherman has written about this in a series of guest articles for CrunchGear. In Part 1 and Part 2 of “Going It Alone: How to Make Your Stuff in China,” he interleaves the experience of his manufacturing trips to China today with the process he went through to build his first product there in 2003.
Hocherman talks about why a company would pick the “go it alone–build it” route instead of licensing a product idea to another firm, and he offers suggestions on how to get the build process started. He recommends steps like having a detailed product specification so you can clearly communicate how the product should act, feel and perform, and he goes into detail on where to find manufacturing partners (for instance, through services like Alibaba and Global Sources), how to approach potential partners and how to narrow your choices.
Contracting out your design and manufacturing always has its challenges, but those challenges are greatly multiplied when you work with people many time zones away in a different language and different culture. Hocherman’s first two installments have brought back my own memories of the exhaustion of jetlag, sketchy taxi rides and having to communicate through pictures. They also remind me of the satisfaction of seeing rows and rows of pallets of my product, boxed and ready to ship to customers. I can’t wait for the rest of the series to learn how building products in China has changed since 2003 and how it has stayed the same. (Keep an eye on Hocherman’s new blog, DesignTheatre.net, for future installments as well as other articles on product design, outsourced manufacturing and starting a company.)
Tools to help you design more environmentally responsible products
Ever since the publishing of Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s tour-de-force manifesto on the complicity of industrial designers in the filling of our landfills, product companies have been searching for ways to minimize the impact of their products while still maximizing their profits. With the help of books like this, as well as new fields of thought and a few online tools, that careful balancing act is becoming far less daunting.
One such field of thought, dubbed biomimicry by its founder and champion, Janine Benyus, is transforming the way scientists, engineers and designers approach thorny challenges. Biomimicry encourages them to first consider how nature may have already solved the very same problem. Too much calcification in your factory’s chimneys? Perhaps you should find out why seashells (made from calcium) are not infinitely large. These relatively ‘simple’ creatures must have a way to prevent further calcification of their shells that is harmless to the environment and readily available (read: free) in ocean water.
Dr. Benyus runs a consultancy called the Biomimicry Guild, which works with clients to uncover solutions to the particular problems they face. There is also the non-profit Biomimicry Institute, which offers a lot of downloadable resources on the practice. (See some great videos of biomimicry in action in Nick’s post on using nature as inspiration in product design.)
A trio of other online tools have emerged in the last few years to simplify the process even further.
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Ecolect offers ways to discover more sustainable materials. Its site includes an online directory of various pre-vetted, eco-friendly materials. You can also subscribe to the GreenBox™ service for about $900 a year to receive a box of 10 or so new environmentally friendly material samples every three months. Ecolect selects samples that are indicative of larger trends in the industry. |
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Sustainable Minds is an affordable, web-based service that helps you estimate, evaluate, compare and track the environmental and human health performance of your products, even in the earliest stages of design. Essentially, you can upload a bill of materials (BOM) and indicate which materials you’re considering for its contents, including their source locations and other facts. You can then calculate the footprint of your product, including how it stacks up in areas like disposal and reuse, and compare it to other benchmarked products. Try tracking it against past revisions of your own design to chart your progress in developing a more environmentally friendly product. |
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Sourcemap is an open source project working to document the carbon footprint of all major products on the American market. Its goal is to help people make more informed decisions about what products they buy by providing a Google Maps mashup and some nifty carbon footprint calculators that show the true supply chain for those products. The team behind this project also sees an opportunity for manufacturers with their acts together to use sourcemap as a platform for proving their environmental chops. |
It’s a brave new world in eco-manufacturing. If you haven’t read Cradle to Cradle, I highly suggest you start there. When you’re ready to apply your learnings, try some of the tools mentioned above.
Know any other resources that should be on this list? Please let us know.
Cheap, fast, easy — and good: A new era of interactive prototyping
The benefits of rapid prototyping have long been self-evident: earlier visibility into tricky aspects of a design and more chances to refine your ideas mean getting to market faster with fewer mistakes.
But as the typical product has become a symphony of electrical, mechanical and software components, prototyping the physical interaction between your product and its intended users before integrating the entire product—and doing so cost-effectively—has remained something of a challenge.
A recent core77 article, Sketching in Hardware is Changing Your Life, documents how hardware sketching—as it is being dubbed—is allowing companies to move well beyond the traditional boundaries of static sketches:
The napkin sketch is the lingua franca of all design. We all do it because—hundreds of years since we started doing it—it’s still the best way to get inspired, to get unstuck, to get real.
Until recently, electronic-device design has been sprinting up the steep incline of Moore’s Law. Our ability to conceptualize early ideas is tripping on its shoelaces. It’s hard to simplify the inherent dynamism of an electronic device—no matter how elaborate the margin doodle, it often confuses more than clarifies. And how could it not? Electronic devices are alive and interactive. They gather information about their environment or user, process values, and respond accordingly. Even the most well-intentioned sketch quickly reaches the limitations of the medium.
If a sketch of a static device can be thought of as a noun, a sketch of an electronic device must be closer to a verb. So while a designer can create storyboards to determine whether a phone should vibrate under specific conditions, like the intensity of light in a given space, to get a feeling for what that really means, a working device—a sketch model—needs to be built.
Sure, there have been ways to prototype physical interaction before: the HC11 and the PIC chip spring to mind. But the kicker is just how easy and accessible the new generation of interactive prototyping tools has become.
Meet the Arduino
For about $100, you (and any plucky start-up who may be eyeing your profit margins) can own an Arduino Board and its accompanying software. Started by a group of very talented and technically savvy interaction designers, the Arduino provides everything you need to start creating fast, cheap and high-fidelity interactive hardware prototypes.
Gone is the need to code and compile instructions in C; instead the Arduino sports its own simplified editing environment based on Hernando Barragán’s Wiring project where you can browse through and reuse hundreds of pre-defined functions for accomplishing all sorts of feats.
Also gone is the hassle of getting your board, your actuators and your sensors to talk to each other. Out of the box, the Arduino can sense its environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors (including capacitive sensing) and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors (servos, steppers, etc.) and a long list of other actuators. It can write to and read from “permanent” storage via EEPROM. It can communicate over Ethernet. It can act as a miniature web server. There’s even a library to allow for the transmission of X10 signals over AC power lines. The sky’s the limit. [For a full list of the available reference libraries, see the Arduino Libraries page.]
The Arduino itself has even spawned derivative projects such as Andre Knörig’s Fritzing which allows you to document and share Arduino-based designs with others.
So the next time you find yourself with a thorny user interaction problem that you can’t quite get your head around without seeing real people trying to solve it, consider taking the plunge into hardware sketching.
And if you want to learn more about the Arduino in the meantime, you can read about it in Wired or listen to a twit.tv podcast with company co-founder Massimo Banzi.
“We have this product idea…it’s going to change the world!”
When I was a design consultant, potential clients would tell us all about how their cool new products were going to take over the market.
Sometimes a company’s product really was cool and new–though it was doubtful it was going to make its mark in the manner envisioned. Occasionally a company was so enamored with its ideas and its technology that its team was unable to step back and see other potential uses or markets for the product.
Heather Fleming from Catapult Design has put together a list of 5 justifications people tell themselves when developing technology and products for people in need. Many apply to product development in general, not just product development for the third world.
Maintaining perspective when designing a new product is important. Projects can be so exciting and full of discovery that it is easy to get carried in new directions. It takes discipline, but by periodically evaluating your work, you can make sure the product you’re developing still meets the needs of the market, the goals for the project and the objectives of your company. It’s the difference between developing great products and developing products that could have been great if only…
3 steps to getting cheap, easy and relevant product feedback (Step 1: Go get it)
More handles are better, right?
In my last post, I laid out three steps for gathering market data:
The idea, of course, is to collect information that helps you make a great product that the market wants. Nothing irks me more than when a “cool” feature finds its way into the products that I use – often at the cost of the usability of the product (and in my case, a cut finger and loss of temper).
Getting the right market information is one of the easiest things you can do. It’s also the hardest. It’s easy because your potential buyers are all around you – via phone, email, in person…and they’re probably all over your website. It’s hard because it takes time you don’t have.
My advice? Just do it.
Step 1. Go get it. Figure out what to ask — and ask it.
Before making any final decisions about what product to build or what new features to build in, ask yourself a number of questions: Is my idea valuable to the market? Does it appeal to the primary buyers and decision makers? Does it map to our company goals?
Then turn these into interview or survey questions and pick up the phone or build a web survey with a free service like SurveyMonkey or Survs. Here’s a sample of how those questions might look:
- How would you characterize the need for cup holders in your car?
- Absolutely necessary. The more the better.
- Useful, as long as they’re not in the way.
- I do not allow eating or drinking in my car.
- How useful would you find heated cup holders to be?
- Extremely useful
- Somewhat useful
- Not useful
- How willing would you be to pay for heated cup holders?
- I’d pay extra just for that feature
- Very likely, but only if it was part of a package (e.g. cold weather package)
- Somewhat likely
- I would not be willing to pay for heated cup holders
Once you know what to ask, find the right people and start asking. This is difficult. Nobody wants to get an unsolicited call from someone they don’t know. It’s hard to incentivize anybody to complete your survey. You don’t want to spam the members of your LinkedIn group. Yes, these are tough objections, but it’s even tougher to explain to management why you spent $1 million on product development and nobody bought your product.
How to find people to talk to:
- Leverage your network – you might be surprised who knows whom
- Dig into your CRM system
- Use LinkedIn (ask a contact to make an introduction)
- Advertise on the website of a relevant organization (I’ve used APICS in the past to advertise a survey)
- Post questions on your website (a simple yes/no may be all you need)
- Hire an army of cheap or free interns to do online research
- Go to where your market is—trade shows, conferences, etc… even if you are a lurker
- And if you have the budget—there are a number of excellent market research firms out there
Be relentless. Track down your buyers and decision makers, ask the questions and record their answers. After a time, you’ll be able to aggregate their responses and determine clear trends.
Great—now you know what your market wants. But what about everyone else in your company?
Step 2. Share it within your company.
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