168: The Future of Hardware Product Design Thinking

Paul Rowan is the Co-Founder of Umbra, a household product company that designs, manufactures, and sells hundreds of consumer products all over the world. You likely have at least one of their products in your home right now. Paul ran Umbra for for 37 years, starting the entire company with just one product. Today Paul is going to share some valuable knowledge on how inventors, startups, and small manufacturers can use both strategic purpose and higher purpose to create a great first product and your first product business. From there, how do you leverage those principles to scale into a global product brand as he did with Umbra. Today you will hear us talk about: Sales can drive hardware ideas, what a great way to sell when you already know what your big buyers want. The culture of work in hardware product design in the future. Hardware designers are going to have a lot of options for developing work-from-home products, mental health issues, more collaborative office space environments and products, and many other emerging opportunities for the changing landscape of design. Artificial Intelligence (AI) AI cannot compete with human intelligence. AI is not a threat, it is the next tool. If you embrace the tools, this will exponentially improve the caliber of your hardware startup. Humanistic direction or robotic direction Purposeful, sustainable, human. This leads to long term. Short term vs long-term value How can you differentiate yourself by adding humanistic values to your company. If you don’t set the bar on good design, you won’t even get to market. Bad design cannot even be put on the shelves. To increase beyond great design, add humanistic values You can compete with big corporate easily on humanistic values as a startup. Sustainability, carbon footprint, sourcing, labor practices. Put your name on a product Don’t be afraid to put your name behind your brand. When you’re in the decision tree of short-term problem solve or long-term value, go for the long term value as that has become more important than ever for modern businesses. Long-term thinking will encourage significantly more success Test and test until you get it right in prototyping, use design thinking. The human behind the design EPISODE LINKS: Paul Rowan Links: LinkedIn | Umbra | PaulRowan.ca The Product Startup Podcast Links: https://www.ProductStartup.com/ Instagram | LinkedIn | Facebook Page | Facebook Group | Pinterest | Twitter | YouTube PTC Links: https://www.ptc.com/ OnShape | Creo Mako Design Links: https://www.makodesign.com/ YouTube | Instagram | LinkedIn | Facebook | Pinterest | Twitter Kevin Mako Links: Instagram | LinkedIn | Quora | Facebook | Twitter Partner: PTC’s best-in-class software solutions Onshape: The only cloud-native product development platform that delivers full-featured computer-aided design (CAD), integrated product data management (PDM) and enterprise analytics in a single system, and Creo: 3D CAD solution that provides designers with the most innovative tools to build better products faster, such as generative design, additive manufacturing, real-time simulation, IIoT, and augmented reality. Producer: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop-shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and manufacturing services. To assist our startup and inventor clients, in addition to above, we help with business strategy, product strategy, marketing, and sales/distribution for all consumer product categories.