Three Keys to Designing Products that Sell

Only 1 in 20 new products actually experience success in the marketplace. Whether it’s software, soap or surgical equipment, the chance of failure is high. So, what does it take to ensure your product beats the odds? Designing a product that sells isn’t an accident. It’s a result of a deliberate, integrated process, or what you might call a “perfect storm” of multiple interrelated considerations and practices.

How can you create that perfect storm? Here are three keys to designing products that sell.

1. Solve real problems

As the saying goes, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” innovation is driven by the quest to solve the real problems encountered by real consumers in their everyday lives. This is why the most successful product designers observe firsthand how actual consumers interact with existing products, looking for “pain points” in users’ experiences as opportunities for overcoming a design flaw or improving on a design.

It’s critical to stay in touch with the actual practicalities of the problem you’re trying to solve with your product. Don’t ever let the design process turn into an abstract exercise. This means considering every step in the use of a product or service and conducting extensive market research as well as value chain analysis. Tap into user forums, customer advisory boards and other methods for gathering data before diving into concept design.

2. Challenge key assumptions

The ability to question assumptions by asking the right questions may be the most important but under-appreciated dimension of product development, as well as the secret to unsticking a stuck process. Albert Einstein was reported to have said, If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.

Some of the most dangerous assumptions are those that may feel intuitively right but don’t hold water. An example is the assumption that the more features a product has, the more desirable to consumers it will be. In reality, research shows that before purchase, consumers may be attracted to a product with a wealth of bells and whistles, realizing only after they purchase that the product delivers an unfriendly user experience.

Taken within the broader context of the consumer and product lifecycle, the assumption that a feature-rich product is necessarily ideal is a severe liability. Assumptions like these need to be identified at every point in the product development process. Whether that relates to product features, materials and cost structures, compliance issues, target price points, and target channels and so forth, don’t allow any assumption to go unchallenged.

3. Insist on coordination

No matter how experienced a design team, otherwise successful products can be derailed by a lack of transparent coordination between stakeholders (including distributors, suppliers, EMS Providers, and OEM), making intensive coordination a crucial piece of the product development puzzle.

Viewing product design, for example, as occurring independently from development, manufacturing, marketing, and sales is a recipe for failure. Successful product development depends on careful coordination at every point in the process, from conception all the way to launch. Implement best practices to recruit stakeholders’ input and gain buy-in on success criteria, as well as for integrated execution and adaptive course-correction.

At Pivot we understand coordination is central to a product’s success, which is why we’ve done away with departmental silos. We’ve replaced these silos with cross-functional, highly collaborative teams who work closely with clients to innovate solutions to their toughest design, development, and manufacturing challenges.

Designing a product that sells isn’t rocket science, but it doesn’t happen without a deliberate, disciplined process. By entering the product development process with an eye for solving real problems, challenging assumptions, and insisting on cross-functional coordination, you can increase the likelihood your product will defy statistics and make your business a success story.

At Pivot, we’ve been partnering with businesses for more than 46 years and are the driving force behind some of the most innovative products on the market. If you’d like to learn more, reach out to us for a no-obligation consultation to see how we can help take your product and business into a profitable future.

3 Paradigm Shifts for International Product Design Firms

Design thinking is a concept most design firms don’t understand well enough to fully leverage to their advantage. It refers to “design” as to how a product is produced, not just how it looks. Therefore, designers should create a process where the consumer’s needs inform how the product is designed.

This may sound simple, but design firms who leverage the full power of design thinking can achieve a complex objective: to create a better product that’s easier to use and makes an emotional connection with its target audience.

Leading companies like Apple, Netflix, and Tesla have used design thinking to their great advantage by making three paradigm shifts in their design process.

1. Shift from siloed specialization to interdisciplinary teams.

Whether a company is developing a new home appliance, a medical device or a personal finance service, physical, digital and service designs are combining.

In a global economy and an era of the Internet of Things, these distinctions are increasingly blending and blurring in the eyes of customers. Companies that shift their focus from siloed “specialization” to cross-trained design teams have been the ablest to think outside the narrow box of “expertise.”

For example, companies that assemble international design teams composed of members with highly diverse cultural backgrounds, divergent professional skills, and seemingly unrelated personal interests are much more likely to generate innovative designs than companies that insist on maintaining department divisions that limit cross-fertilization and stifle creativity.

2. Shift from seeing design as a step in the process to seeing it as an ongoing part of the process.

Design shouldn’t be a stage but an end-to-end iterative process in product development. Concepting, logistics, execution, launch, support – design should part of it all.

Don’t be afraid to use the “toggle” approach when working with your designers. For example, stereo system architects create two product specifications. The first outlines basic functionality considerations, like size and output capacity. The second specification for “bells and whistles” allows designers to incorporate customer feedback and technological advances through iterative prototyping. Vehicle manufacturers are beginning to take this approach by analyzing driver data and remotely updating a vehicle’s software after the vehicle has been sold as informed by driver data.

3. Shift from applying design thinking to products consumers want to applying design thinking to metrics that determine consumer demand

This one’s a game-changer. Apply design thinking to your company’s business model, operations and culture to gain commercial success. Successful companies design with a deep understanding of their customer, and they gain that information through metrics for qualitative and quantitative variables that inform product development and design metrics. This helps them measure and calibrate design at every development phase.

Example: One company created design metrics that used weighted measures for specific product features. This allowed the design team to create the product over time, using hard data to inform each round of development. That data revealed what features customers cared about most and made it easier to design the product accordingly.

Perhaps most tellingly, the idea for what turned out to be the most popular feature didn’t come from the design team but rather from the conjoint analysis surveys — a testament to design thinking’s understanding that the active role of the customer in the design process is indispensable.

If you’re ready to make a paradigm shift in your operations or are trying to bring a product to either an international or domestic market, we can help. At Pivot, we have a track record of over forty years of expert experience in partnering with manufacturers to optimize their operations, and with businesses to help them successfully launch new products. Contact us today and see what we can do for you.

Thinking Globally and Acting Locally in Product Design

Turning ideas into products—designing and manufacturing those products and devising all the steps in between—can appear daunting even under the best of circumstances. When you throw into the mix different markets and cultures in multiple countries and regions around the world, product design can take on an entirely new meaning. Embracing a global perspective in industrial product engineering and new product development requires patience, knowledge, and research.

Here are some best-practice tips to navigate global expansion and product design:

Research your market/s.

Your brand and product design should complement the needs of customers in the country or countries you’re targeting for your product. Who are your customers? What’s most important to these individuals or groups?

From a product-design perspective, although a single product design or prototype may appear to be applicable across countries or regions, that may not be the case. Now isn’t the time for guesswork. Often the solution lies in modifying product-design characteristics to address the needs of specific customers in carefully defined countries and regions. Jump into research as part of your due diligence before you decide where and when to offer your product, and let design services lead the way.

Understand and appreciate the locals.

Don’t hesitate to rely on feedback from your contacts in target markets. These are the individuals you could be serving (or already are). You may be doing business “globally,” but everything is local. Learn about residents’ product-design preferences and business customs. Communicate with local businesses and potential employees as you develop audience-centered product-engineering plans and craft product expansion efforts. Remember that effective product design is an integral part of the product development process.

Combine patience and tenacity for success.

Entering new markets or expanding services into existing markets with a new or redesigned product should be a long-term strategy. Frankly, it’s not for the faint of heart. It can be time-consuming, frustrating, and a drain on resources. In manufacturing, an organization is often expected to have “boots on the ground” — a physical presence — in the country in which it’s manufacturing. But the rewards of expansion, financial and otherwise, can be significant.

Pivot offers a wide range of business expertise and solutions to support your global and product design efforts. Contact us today for more information, or to discuss your needs.

Profiles of Some of the World’s Best Product Designers

A good product designer is a key person on the ideal product development team. Product design impacts our lives everyday. From the cup we have our coffee in every morning to the mattress we go to sleep on at the end of every day, the results of good product design are all around us. Here are just a few of the world’s best product designers and the products they created.

James Dyson

You probably guessed from his name that James Dyson, a British inventor, is responsible for the invention of the Dyson vacuum. What made the Dyson vacuum different — apart from its being the world’s first bagless vacuum — was that it also had a 360 degree swivel head and a bladeless fan. The vacuum is a result of Dyson’s frustration with his own vacuum’s poor performance.

Kenichiro Ashida

Japanese researcher and product designer Kenichiro Ashida is the man responsible for the design of the Nintendo Wii and Gamecube. He was also responsible for the introduction of motion-control gaming. Nintendo wanted to increase player interaction by creating a control that could be operated using motion as well as buttons, which resulted in the development of the Wii wand.

Charles and Ray Eames

Together the husband and wife team of Charles and Ray (short for Bernice Alexandra) Eames designed the first molded plywood lounge chair in the 1950s. The chair has a matching ottoman and is still in production today. The Eames’ also supplied the Navy with leg splints and stretchers during World War II.

Richard Buckminster Fuller

Richard Buckminster Fuller is an American designer from Milton, Massachusetts. His daughter died from complications of polio and spinal meningitis at the age of four. Blaming the damp and drafty conditions of his home, Fuller became determined to design affordable and efficient housing. The most famous design belonging to Richard Buckminster Fuller is the geodesic dome. He was well known for encouraging other designers to create sustainable and affordable designs that incorporated renewable sources of energy.

Sir Jonathan Ive

As Senior Vice President of Design at Apple Inc., Sir Jonathan Ive oversees the design of the MacBook, iPod, iPad, iPhone, and iOS7. The MacBook came about when “Jony” was working as a designer in London. He was asked to create a new look for a laptop. When he took the design back to Apple, he was hired immediately. As of July 1, 2017, Ive is also the current Chancellor of the Royal College of Art in London.

Having an experienced designer on your product development team is key to avoiding early design problems. However, sometimes products need to be redesigned. Every inventor can learn from a product redesign, but having an experienced designer on your team can help you ensure your product gets to market successfully and without redesigns.

Pivot International is a product design and development company with global contract electronics manufacturing services (EMS) in both the US and Philippines. We offer turnkey product development including software development, mechanical product design, electrical and electronic product design and industrial design services for product development. If you’re interested in learning how we can help with your project, contact us today.

Six Ways to Inspire Your Product Design Team

Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

-Steve Jobs

Design-thinking, as the name suggests, is not a noun but rather a verb: not an end product, per se, but a process through which a superior product or outcome is created in the first place. It’s well and good for you and your design team to aim for a superior product or outcome, but what you get depends on how you get there.

Design-thinking is this how: a strategy that can be applied not only to product design and development but to systems, procedures, protocols, user experiences and even to the business itself. As a strategic process for maximizing profitable innovation, you can inspire design-thinking in your team by adhering to these six practices.

1. Cultivate trust with your team and within your team.

As international management guru Steven Covey asserts, “The first job of a leader is to inspire trust…trust is the highest form of human innovation.” Anxiety and animosity is the enemy of inspiration and creative collaboration so it’s critical to foster a climate of mutual trust. Best practices include:

• Actively listen. Show your team members that you recognize and respect them as equals by being sincerely interested in their ideas (as well as their difficulties). Listen with the intent to understand and support rather than reprove or correct, and reflect back what you hear to ensure accurate understanding.
• Balance advocacy and inquiry. Trust is compromised when a team leader or team member advocates for their own idea or agenda without actively inquiring of other members of the team where they stand in relation to this idea or agenda. Balancing advocacy and inquiry shows your team that you’re just as interested in and open to their experience and position as your own.
• Say yes before saying no. Even if a member of your team comes up with an idea that you don’t like or seems unfeasible, say yes to it. This doesn’t mean uncritically adopting or going with an idea, it means respectfully acknowledging it, being willing to thoroughly explore it before dismissing it, and having the humility to remember that what might not make sense to you right now may be a game-changing idea for your business.

2. Begin at the end and work backwards.

Design-thinking is thinking that begins with questions about the end-user’s experience and then works backward toward the creation of an innovation that delivers accordingly. This approach is intrinsically inspiring because rather than focusing on how to solve customers’ problems, it focuses on how to create compelling customer experiences.

While design-thinking doesn’t shy away from identifying problems to be solved, it digs deeper into the underlying wants and needs that are at the root of a perceived problem. For example, after city officials became aware of growing dissatisfaction with their light-rail service and fare prices, they adopted a design-thinking approach.

Rather than assuming the solution lay in additional transit stations and lower fares, they began by asking how intra-city public transit could be made more enjoyable and affordable? Upon further investigation, it was discovered that many of the city’s citizens expressed a desire for alternative forms of public transportation, leading the city to implement an incredibly successful, no-cost public bike-share program as well as a campaign promoting the health benefits of walking.

3. Assume a both/and orientation.

Differences within your design team aren’t a problem to be minimized or gotten rid of but rather a powerful solution waiting to be unlocked. Inspiring innovation in a team means thinking in terms of both/and rather than either/or. Design-thinking actively recruits and innovatively integrates multiple perspectives and works creatively with rather than against differences.

When differences are recognized and purposely recruited as fuel for innovation, this creates the conditions for a proliferation of perspectives and ideas to put on the table. Further, it allows even conflict to be engaged constructively, since the very existence of conflict begs the reconciliation (via integration) of competing perspectives and ideas toward an innovative, win-win outcome.

An illustrative example of this difference-leveraging innovation is the Apple iPhone (that took a both/and rather than either/or orientation to combining a phone, MP3 player, digital camera, and handheld computer into one device). Another famous (and much emulated) example is the Volkswagen Beetle’s groundbreaking Think Small and Lemon campaigns (which proudly highlighted to strategic advantage the very things – smallness and alleged ugliness – that detractors believed would doom the Beetle to market failure).

4. Take a field trip.

Design-thinking can get you and your team outside the proverbial “box”, and that includes getting out of the office. Seek out places and activities that hold inspirational promise for and your team, whether that’s backpacking in the wilderness, exploring a museum, or even touring a competitor’s showroom or checking out their shelf space at your local retailer.

Not only is a change of scene a powerful way to help your team shift and expand perspective, taking a field trip with the intention of deliberately seeking inspiration can yield surprisingly generative results. Field trips taken to directly investigate your team’s experience (positive, negative, and neutral) with your competitor’s products or services can be especially illuminating, particularly if you allocate dedicated time afterward for your team to unpack, compare, and explore field data in relation to your own design project.

5. Allow time for incubation.

It may seem counterintuitive, but inspiration needs room to breath. It’s an oft repeated adage in the innovation literature that the real magic often happens at the water cooler. (This is a way of saying that inspiration often strikes most powerfully outside of structured efforts to innovate: in the time between scheduled meetings and strategy sessions where people are free to socialize and “unplug”.)

As the saying goes, you can’t rush the river, and one sure way to kill inspiration is to make premature demands of your team to produce. This is where a short “retreat” – a stepping back from active attempts at design-thinking into a more receptive, meditative mode – can pay powerful dividends. Initiating a formal or informal retreat or simply allowing your team to “sleep on it” – especially when you come to an impasse or a difficult decision – is a time-tested way to incubate an idea or problem toward a novel solution.

6. Engage the collaborative art of experimental play.

There’s a reason why five-year-olds out perform CEO’s in the Marshmallow Challenge, a staple exercise of design schools made famous in management circles as an exercise in rapid prototyping. Five-year-olds, unlike CEO’s (and the lawyers and business school students they also best) are masters of experimental play: collaborative, curiosity-driven, intrinsically satisfying efforts to explore for the sake of exploring and create something for the sheer fun of it. When five-year-olds are presented with their design challenge (build a freestanding structure than can support a marshmallow on top), they aren’t daunted, they’re inspired. Five-year-olds don’t see a problem to be solved; they see an opportunity for collaborative, experimental play.

Teams that can approach innovation like the five-year-old champions of the Marshmallow Challenge (who demonstrate an intuitive understanding of the innovation principle articulated by thought leader John C. Maxwell: fail early, fail often, but always fail forward), will become masters of design-thinking and rapid prototyping. Properly understood, rapid prototyping is the natural expression of experimental play where designs can be created, tested, revised, refined, and iteratively redesigned until the elusive “sweet spot” of peak innovation is reached.

At Pivot, we bring over forty years of experience in inspiring innovative design and competitive results. Contact us today and see what we can do for you and your team.

How To Troubleshoot an Early Design Problem

Developing a product, especially in the early phases, can be fraught with problems. These problems, however, should not be viewed as necessarily problematic, but rather as a normal and expected part of a larger process.

While some of the problems encountered in early product design may be a result of insufficient research and planning, many problems are simply intrinsic to the iterative nature of the design process. At Pivot, we’re experts in troubleshooting common problems that arise during product design and development. Below are a series of key considerations that clients may find useful for investigating, understanding and contending with design difficulties.

Don’t be afraid to deviate.

The requirements in product-development projects rarely (if ever) remain stable. When organizations insist on sticking to a plan that can’t accommodate the ever-evolving nature of product design, they understandably run into problems. Refusing to deviate from a plan or viewing deviations as evidence of poor management can halt product development in its tracks and damage the morale of your design team. If design efforts are proceeding as they should (in an iterative, experimental fashion), what does and doesn’t work and which direction to go often becomes clear only as development unfolds.

The problem of defining a customer’s needs at the beginning of a design project is intrinsic to the process as it isn’t easy for customers to accurately anticipate and articulate their needs for solutions that aren’t currently available. Customers’ preferences can also change unexpectedly as they become familiar with competitors’ offerings and demand features or functions that your design team hasn’t planned for or considered. For these reasons, being unwilling to deviate from an original plan – no matter how masterful and fail-proof it seemed at the inception of the project – can generate more problems than it was intended to prevent. This is not to suggest that planning and plans aren’t important, but rather that the plan should be regarded as a hypothesis that is constantly subject to revision as the “data” that is generated by the design process is used to continually reinform it.

Question assumptions to reframe the problem.

Difficulties in the design process are often a result of failing to question assumptions and reframe the design problem in novel ways. The design process will become unnaturally complicated if a team is asking the wrong questions (and therefore failing to adequately understand the problem they’re trying to solve). Questioning assumptions and asking the right questions may be the most important but under appreciated dimension of product development and the most important key to unsticking a stuck process. Albert Einstein was reported to have said, If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.

For example, when Walt Disney was “imagineering” Disneyland, he was able to question the assumption that simply building a bigger and better amusement park than those of his apparent competitors was the road to success. Instead, he reframed the problem from one of mere “imitative expansion” into one of disruptive innovation: How could Disneyland create a magical experience for its guests? The ability to ask this question didn’t come out of nowhere: it entailed intensive, often obsessive research, ongoing experimentation, and deep insights into what “magical” might mean as translated into a functioning theme park.

See the value in the innovation maxim: Fail early, fail often, fail forward.

Organizational cultures that embrace a “zero tolerance for failure” or “error-free” orientation, and teams that are overly anxious or intolerant about “getting it wrong” will find their resistance to failing is preventing them from getting it right. Conversely, teams that receive organizational sanction and even encouragement to strategically “fail early, fail often, fail forward” are much better able to iterate rapidly and learn quickly from the valuable data that each “failure” generates and bequeaths to the next iteration until a truly superior design emerges. With advances in simulation and rapid-prototyping technologies, there is no excuse for “failing to fail”. Stefan Thomke of Harvard Business School explains:

Consider what we found in a study of 391 teams that designed custom integrated circuits. Teams that followed an iterative approach and conducted early and frequent tests made more errors along the way. But because they used low-cost prototyping technologies, they outperformed (in terms of the time and effort required) teams that tried to get their design right the first time. The teams that faced high prototyping costs invested more effort on specification, development, and verification. And because they did their iterations later in the process – and did far fewer of them – they delayed the discovery of critical problems.

Investigate how less can be more.

Sometimes product development teams think that the more bells and whistles they can cram into a product the more desirable it will be to consumers. Often this belief is more a reflection of the team’s lack of objectivity about their own design as well as a disconnect from the end-user’s experience. (As discussed earlier, it is also an illustrative example of the problems that can arise when design teams fail to ask the right questions.) Though on the surface there are notable exceptions to the “less is more” approach, deeper investigation of these exceptions (the Apple iPhone, for example) demonstrates that successful mass-market products with a proliferation of “bells and whistles” must compensate by being exceptionally simple to use. (It’s worth noting that providing a multitude of features and a streamlined, user-friendly interface is an incredibly rare and game-changing feat).v

Many products are overly complicated because design teams assume that more features translate to higher value and consumer demand and that less features translate to lower consumer desirability. Often design teams run into problems that can be prevented altogether or quickly solved if they can think in terms of addition instead of subtraction. As Steve Jobs explained:

When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple, you don’t really understand the complexity of the problem. And your solutions are way too oversimplified. Then you get into the problem, and you see it’s really complicated. And you come up with all these complicated solutions …That’s where most people stop. The really great person will keep on going and find…the key underlying principle of the problem and come up with a beautiful, elegant solution that works.

At Pivot, we’ve helped hundreds of teams solve their most intractable design problems. Contact us today and see what we can do for you.