In this episode, we sit down with Kyle MacDonald, a product designer and brand strategist who brings over ten years of experience across e-commerce CPG, startups, and lifestyle brands. Kyle breaks down the critical missteps that derail product launches, reveals his framework for achieving genuine product-market fit, and explains how to craft products that connect with your consumers. From research methodologies to manufacturing partnerships and marketing alignment, his insights provide a roadmap for brand owners ready to build sustainable, profitable businesses. Read the full transcript below.
Episode 41 of The Seller’s Edge – Kyle and Jonathan talk about:
- [00:00] Introduction
- [00:49] Everyone Rushes Products
- [01:42] Manufacturing Can Be Tricky
- [03:04] Fatal Product Flaws
- [07:58] Seller Blindspots
- [10:26] Leveraging Failures
- [11:58] You Have To Prove Yourself Wrong
- [12:49] 3 Kinds of Research
- [15:13] Turning Insights Into Innovation
- [17:28] Get A Headstart on Marketing
- [20:04] Design Vs. Technical Feasibility
- [23:15] Skipping A Step Can Be Fatal
- [25:03] Ensure Your Product Is Manufacturable
- [27:11] Timeline For Tooling & Production
- [33:05] The Most Problematic Part of The Process
- [35:45] Balancing Product & Marketing
- [40:32] Small Changes, Massive Impacts
- [46:37] Recap and Closing Remarks
Key Takeaways:
- Do Extensive Research: Dedicate at least 16% of the overall product development budget to upfront research, including customer needs, market opportunities, and technical constraints.
- Avoid Universal Products: Avoid adding unnecessary features in an attempt to appeal to everyone. Instead, focus on delivering a clear, precise solution for a well-defined audience.
- Get Comprehensive Feedback: Validate prototypes and product ideas directly with real customers early on, seeking feedback that is candid and unvarnished, not just from internal teams.
- Collaborate Closely With Manufacturers: Provide detailed designs and be ready for several rounds of sampling, testing, and iteration. Expect several months from final design to the first production run, especially for overseas manufacturing.
- Keep Users & Rituals In Mind: Build brand stories, marketing, and even listing content based on authentic user feedback and the real functional improvements the product delivers, not on hypothetical taglines or trends.
Full Transcript of Episode:
JONATHAN: Is it just excitement that causes people to be like, let’s get this out, let’s get it out the door tomorrow. I don’t care if it’s missing doors.
KYLE MACDONALD: I mean, to be fair and hopefully very respectful, we all have blind spots, right? We all don’t really know what we’re doing most of the time. And in my experience working with entrepreneurs for pretty much my whole career, I’ve been in startups and consulted with entrepreneurs as a designer for a long time. They don’t really know what they’re doing. But if you think about, like an entrepreneur who’s never made a product, going through the process, they have like these high points. They understand, they’ve watched some YouTube videos and they know how to sell it. They know how to build the Amazon listing. So it’s like, let’s get through this gray area, this foggy zone of product development as fast as we can so I can start doing the thing I know how to do. So I feel like people kind of accept good enough. And also manufacturing can be a real tricky thing because your manufacturing partner might tell you this is as good as it’s going to get. You have to trust us because maybe they don’t want to work on it anymore or invest any more of their resources in developing it for you. You never really know what’s motivating your manufacturer to give you the advice they’re giving you. So you see people, without realizing it, running past critical checkpoints in stage gates in product development that ensure really important things like, do your customers care about this improvement? That’s a really important thing. Also cycle, testing quality, making sure that the type of plastic you’re choosing to inject is going to stand up to the environmental conditions that the product lives in. And your manufacturer isn’t going to be able to tell you that. You have to tell your manufacturer that. You can ask, them and they might help you a little bit, but you’re, you have to tell them everything. So if you don’t know what to ask or what to tell, you’re going to fly past these checkpoints and end up with a product that you just have to go backwards to fix. And that’s where I think people start to lose confidence. Oh, crap. I can’t even really do the part I’m good at because now I’m stuck in the weeds of this product development for sure.
JONATHAN: I’m curious if anyone’s ever come to you with a product and said, hey, we want to do X, Y and Z and you either at that point or at some point soon after realize that there’s a fatal flaw in the thinking in the product. Like, it’s just like this can’t be done because of this reason.
KYLE MACDONALD: I have too many of those. I think if you talk to any designer who works in product development, not just like product design, but like who works through the process of manufacturing and development, they all have the experience. But the company I’m working for now, actually, we’ve been through a lot of changes in our company. We’re really young. We have a product on the market that’s been for sale for about six months and we’re working on establishing sort of like a, like a ground level customer base to grow the business in terms of sales and revenue. But the, beginning of my time there, which is really the beginning of the company, was so focused on product development and brand development. And they came to me with a product that was like a prototype. And the prototype was 3D printed. It had internal parts that were like sourced from Newegg, like computer parts. It just wasn’t good. But it was a prototype. And every time you see a prototype, you’re like a prototype. I was like, this is actually kind of sick. There’s some interesting interactions here. The general form is cool. I can see that we’re proving out the concept, but that’s about all we’re getting from this is like a proof of concept. That’s my vision of it. Their vision of it was like, we’re going to launch this to customers in six weeks. And so they pulled me in to get this thing to market in six weeks. And just from looking at the design that they had, it’s like, this is not even manufacturable. And it would take six weeks for it to get back from China. So like, you have a long way to go. And I could see what all the problems were from right then. I mean, we’re talking about like almost a 10 year gap between the last story and this story. So I saw it immediately and I’m like, you’re nowhere near this thing getting to market and being acceptable by customers for trading money for it. No way that this is going to get manufactured. No, no manufacturer is going to pick this up and turn it around for you in a short timeline. There’s way too far to go. And so I just asked them for like five hours of budget. And I was like, give me five hours at my rate and let me see what I can do. And I sketched, for like 30 minutes and I was like, okay, we’re getting somewhere. Let’s see what we can do. And within six hours, maybe I spent like six hours. I’d redesigned the thing and then put it on my 3D printer in the basement. And I came back to them, I was like, it needs to be like this and it’s going to take you nine months. And they’re like, we don’t have nine months. And so I just like, okay, hi, bring me on and I’ll see what I can do. And so we ended up getting the product manufactured. And every touch point was bad. You know, like, the tech was bad, the interactions were bad, the material choices were bad. All of it was not just bad, but impossible. Like, it wouldn’t have worked, but we got to a product in the market in about four and a half months. About half the time that I thought. And I think the reason for that, and this is not to, like, toot my own porn at all, but the reality is, without having a bunch of people trying to impress upon the product what it needed to be, and just having them realize after having that first, like, this is what you guys need to make. They were like, okay, yeah, I had no idea what I was doing. You just do it. And just working on something focused with the expertise of user experience, material selection, manufacturing logistics. We got that thing to market, like, super fast. And it’s a cool product. Like, I’m really happy with it. Proud of that.
JONATHAN: No, that’s really great. I really like that. It’s funny you brought up the selfie, stick. And it’s funny because the number one and consistently I see with a product, the problem with the product design is always with webcams, because webcams will be great, like, the actual technology. I don’t think that they spend. They probably spend like 3% of the time thinking about the mount rather than the camera itself, because it might work on this kind of monitor, but it won’t work on a laptop or you can mount. And I feel like in the day of content creation, people are probably mounting webcams on all sorts of things. And I don’t think any thought goes into that. It’s funny that you brought up the selfie stick, because I was just like, yeah, that’s just. I feel like maybe that’s just a problem that somebody really needs to dive into for cameras across the board and think about that.
KYLE MACDONALD: I mean, on the theme of, like, how do people make mistakes in product development, I think something that entrepreneurs who haven’t made products before or haven’t sold products. Because there’s a ton of entrepreneurs who are like, sidekicking is like universal fit, multifunctionality, modularity. There’s these things that, for some reason, it’s like, it’s ingrained in our DNA to think that that’s going to make a product better, but they dilute the effectiveness of the product. Every time. There was a time in my career where it felt like every single product idea that came through was like, there’s this, but add this and this and this. Even when I worked at Spokandy, that kind of thing came out, like, to be competitive, add more features, you know, and, it’s just not the way to go. And that’s a really big problem. And there’s, I think we definitely need to be talking about, like, how do you find out who to sell a product to? How do you, right, size the product for a certain use case and then try not to overproduce or over market the product to people who will give it bad reviews or who it won’t actually help? Some people call it product market fit. You have to do your research. You have to understand when you’re developing a product like, what is the problem? And instead of saying, how can I extend this product to more people? It’s how can I solve this product more acute? Like, more precisely? And if we can bring a product down instead of up, in that way, you actually make a product simpler to manufacture almost every time, simpler to describe, which makes it easier to sell and easier to partner with your suppliers, and it becomes easier to use too, you know, so if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re listening to this podcast and you have an idea that’s like, we need a speaker. And the speaker is also going to be a drone because we. I want this thing to move with me, you know, I want to listen. I’m tired of my headphones. Like, no. Figure out some other way to make people feel hyped while they’re moving around. It’s like, that’s the. And that’s the key, really. Like, can you reframe the problem to figure out how to create the reward feeling that you want with less? You know, how do you get more precise to create that reward that you’re trying to bring your customers with less? Because ultimately that’s good business.
JONATHAN: Yeah, you make a lot of great points. I think the whole thing about failing fast, I’m all for it. I think, like, failures absolutely help us get better. I think it’s about the scope of the failure. Like I’d rather make a product or like a prototype, give it to 40 people, have them try to break it and then come back to me and tell me that they’ve broken it and that X, Y, Z is wrong with it, rather than go to market with it, have the entire like, have thousands of people buy it and then come back and be like this is broken. And be like, oof. Okay, this is a little different. My next question is because we’ve been talking about the steps and kind of dancing around it. I’m curious, like walk us through what the actual stages of creating a product should be or I guess best practices for it are anyway.
KYLE MACDONALD: Well, you definitely have to explore a bunch. I like to spend probably about. I’ve actually done this before in process building. About 16% of the time it takes to design the project should be dedicated to research. 16% of your budget. Like at least 16%. I was working at an agency and trying to justify greater front end research for our, clients. I was like, if we’re. And I was interviewing other principals at other agencies all over the place and trying to figure out like how do I justify to my principal, to my boss like that we’re going to start investing more time in research for our clients. 16%. Now what are you researching? Well, first you have to prove yourself wrong. If you can, you have an assumption that’s the easiest place to start is ask the yes or no questions. If people really care about this idea and you can do that by actually asking people, by describing it to them. You can do that more secretively like looking at analogous products and reading the reviews. You just have to validate, like do some high level validation. That validation, if you’re doing it with open mind, is going to point you to opportunities you didn’t really see before. And those are going to start formulating questions too. Now this can be a rabble. This is why I say 16% because you have to know when to stop doing research. Early career. I was doing research for months and I like couldn’t decide on like how to synthesize all the stuff I was learning into the product. But the research that you’re doing is kind of in three buckets. You have your market research, you have your consumer research and you have your technical research. Market research involves a lot of the business stuff about costing, about demand, like demand research, trying to figure out where’s the hole in the marketplace. Your consumer research is where you stop thinking about competing and start thinking about innovating. It’s that Blue Ocean strategy. When you start really looking at the customer is when you start to see where nobody is playing, where they’ll leave the red blood competition, competition zone over here and go over to the fresh clean water and be like, whoa, there’s a food source over here. You know, every product can find Blue Ocean. It’s not just about how it looks or how it feels or how it works. It’s also how are you talking about that product. And the research you’re doing in the customer is going to help you design the right product, but it’s also going to help you frame how you approach the customer with that product. It’s also. And that’s going to help you design it. Like everything that you’re learning should go into everything that you give out. Everything you bring in should find a way to synthesize itself out into the product. Or else you wasted your time asking that question. And then of course the technical research, and the technical research is like about choosing the right material, making sure that, like we talked about before, that your material will stand up to the environmental conditions, that it can deal with the repeating cycles of use, that it, fits the sort of values of the customer you’re speaking to. You know, like it’s sustainability is huge. If the product that you’re making or that you want to make can’t be made in quantities or in economies of scale out of a product, out of a material that people will actually buy, People don’t want plastic packaging. People are trying to get plastic out of everything. Can you make it at a price point people can stomach out of something other than plastic? You don’t. If you don’t know that you’re going to get really far into this process and realize you have to make it out of plastic. And if all the research that you did said that you have to get plastic out of this product, now you have to find a way to tell people, no, no, no, no, no, this plastic is okay and we’re offsetting it over here. You’re just creating more work to do if you’re not doing that type of research. So you have to do the research. And that’s step one. Step two is synthesizing that research. That’s where you’re like, this is where a lot of people really get lost too, is in synthesis. How do I turn an insight about materiality, about people’s values? This is an easy one. People value the environment. I can make a requirement on my product that it has to be recycled. Or recyclable, you know, like, what is the limit people will accept? So you have to basically translate all your research into to a product requirements document, a prd, as an entrepreneur that can just live in your head, but if you’re working at a bigger organization, you have to communicate these requirements. This has to be like this based, on my user research. This has to be operable with one hand because say it’s a baby product and mommy’s carrying the baby and she has to be able to open this thing with one hand that has to hit that prd. So these things about like busy mom. And I observed how they move through the house when they’re holding their baby and their baby’s crying. And I got to see how they start to be a little more careless with their other hand when they’re frustrated and trying to move quickly. So now I know that this has to be really easy to grab. I have to know it has to be really easy to operate. So you have to translate all of your research into requirements that actually can be turned into product. So now you have requirements about usability, you have requirements about materiality, you have requirements, all of this stuff exists before you even draw, right? Like you have an idea, the idea shouldn’t even like put it on paper. You have to get your stuff out of your head because everything that’s in your head goes stale immediately. So get it out as soon as it comes. But let that inspire the questions that you ask in research to change the way that you approach designing the product. So you have your product requirements document that synthesized all of your insights into things that can be manifested into three dimensions. Interactions, electronics, everything, all of it’s in there, even ui. I mean I just basically gave you three different ways to say interaction. The interaction, materiality, packaging, even all the way into marketing. Like at some points in, like at school, Candy, we would take the product requirements document and the inside story because I got into the habit of like actually writing a story about a fake customer, like a five or six page story about a fake customer day in the life. And I would take the PRD and the inside story to the marketing team and we’d build a marketing requirements document before we design the product that like, we think that the thing that will resonate with the customer in the way we talk about this product, the story we’re telling, are going to be these major points and I’m going to hold myself to those points while I’m building the product. So when somebody holds the product, it’s already telling them that story too. You know what I mean? Consistency across the whole thing. And we’ve only gotten 16 into the project right now. So do your research is thing because, if you ask the right questions, you get the right answer. Jonathan, I’m going to bring Bruno in right here because he’s so important. Bruno Munari, for those uninitiated. Jonathan and I work together and I used to talk about Bruno and every one of these little talks I’d give because he’s a design genius. This old Italian man no longer with us, he had like a 80 year professional design career. Are you kidding? But he said that the form of an object should arise spontaneously from its function. And there’s such a passive voice in that. How do you get something to arise spontaneously out of anything? You just learn more about its function. The more I know about the function, the more shape it’s going to give the object. And function is not just about how it operates, but it’s how it functions in the person’s heart, in their mental models of how this thing should work, how it functions on the shelf in the planogram or functions on, you know, your digital shopping page, all of that stuff. You can answer those questions before you have the product, at least to the point where you can make it accurately. So we talked before about getting really precise. This research process is the time where you start to figure out what can we cut out? How can we speak really directly to a specific consumer? Because no matter what, you’re going to sell it to the person who’s not your perfect customer, but you want that to be your second, third, fourth, fifth customer. You want the first customer to be the perfect fit. So they talk really good about it. So narrow, narrow, narrow, refine, refine, refine. Now we get into the product development, the product design process. So we’ve done research, now we’re in design. Design is really important. But you can get kind of carried away with design if you’re not checking in with technical feasibility and market fit the whole way through. So you’re double checking back in with your, your product requirements document and with your marketing team and all this stuff as you’re designing and you’re holding yourself to this rubric that you’ve agreed upon. I actually used this term when we worked together at Thrasio, when I was like guiding my design team. I was like, before you get into design, you have to show me the rubric. If you ask me to give you feedback on whether this is A good design, I’m going to tell you how I feel. But if you give me a rubric that says, this is what a successful product in this space would look like and accomplish, I can give you real feedback on how close you’re getting to that. So we’re just designing and iterating against the checklist now. That is making sure that we’re getting rid of all of that and we’re making a really precise product. And design is full of activities that can help you refine down from sketching and visualizing in two dimensions to 3D printing to building paper models that help you to understand an interaction. You have to play with this thing, and you always want to move fast. It’s like, fail. Fast is the key in product design. I also like to train designers that, like, designing is testing. Product design is very scientific. You have to. That rubric is essentially like the instructions. You still have to make hypotheses that say. I think the best way that we’re going to hit this requirement in the rubric is with magnets or with, living hinge, like a molded plastic hinge instead of like a mechanical hinge. Because also in the requirements are like, how much can we spend on the product based on what we know about how much it’s going to cost or what our msr, our projected MSRP is. So you have all these things you make, you make hypotheses. And then the activities that you do in product development and design should just, all be about testing the hypothesis. So designers are just scientists. It’s just, you’re creating experiments to validate whether what you think is right or wrong. And this is the whole process. That’s what we talked about at the very beginning. That’s what research is for. Design is research. But now you’re doing it in three dimensions, and you’re confirming that my assumption about this is right or wrong. And if it’s wrong, why is it wrong? It was wrong because magnets are too expensive at the strength that I need. So I’m going to get a spring instead. Now that I have a spring, I have to test something differently, because springs have consistent force all the way through their range of motion, whereas a magnet just has it for magnetic field. What does that change for the user experience? How do I test that? 3D printing is probably the best way to test that. Okay, I’m going to put all my time into building a 3D printed model of that mechanism. And when you chunk it out like that, that it might only take you an hour and a half to print out something to validate that a spring works as good as a magnet on that hinge. You know what I’m saying? So your design activities are once again trying to prove yourself wrong. You have hypotheses held up against your rubric. Your rubric comes from Your research. Your research came from your original idea. And your original idea was probably just a small thing that you thought you could just like, I’ll take this simple technology and this simple technology, and I like the way that thing looks. We’re going to pile them together. That’s where a lot of people jump straight into. I need to find someone who can make this. They can make this widget. And this is what happened with my current company, Arom Therapist is they were like, make this widget. And I’m like, hang on, we got work to do before we start going in and make the widget. And so you do all that. Now, this is the beautiful thing about designing this way is it’s inquisitive. It’s propelled by curiosity and the goal of making the best thing for the right person. And it seems like it takes a long time, but it doesn’t take a long time because once you have the right thing, you just package it up and give it to your manufacturer. And now, you know, this is how much it’s going to cost. And if you tell me it’s going to cost more than this, I can’t work with you. Now. You’re not getting run over by people who speak a different language and literally and figuratively speak a different language and have different expertise because you, you know, you know you’re going to move a lot quicker through every phase of development. And that’s where the timeline gets long. Like, development is where the timeline’s long. I’ll break this down for you guys when you get into product development. And this is where we’re at. Now in the process, we’ve designed it, we’ve tested it against all of its different requirements. We’ve got, engineering decisions made and technical decisions validated through the design of the product. And now we’re going into manufacturing. It’s going to take probably two or three months. Unless you’re going to go to China, say you’re going overseas to manufacture. Most of us are. It’s going to take you two or three months to make sure that what they are going to cut into steel to make your product is going to do it, is going to make a good product. That’s called design for Manufacturing, you can have a fully complete design. In the case of aromatherapist, the product that I, the second example that I gave you, I engineered the whole thing. I had it figured out. I worked with engineers to make sure that it was manufacturer manufacturable. I had draft angles on all the plastics, I had assembly instructions. I had, I’d sourced all the screws myself and the springs. I tested everything out and I sent it to the manufacturer and they were like, this is good, but we can make it better. If you do a really good job in design, your manufacturer will do a really good job refining it for you. If you do a really poor job in design, your manufacturer will take it off the rails. It’s like without, fail, if you give them a partial design and you don’t really know what you’re doing, they’re going to tell you to do something you don’t want to do every time. But if you do a really good job in design, they’re going to know exactly how to make it better. From the minute they look at it. It’s the same as like when I picked up the first aroma amplifier that 3D printed mock up. And I knew immediately how to make it better. If you do a good job in design, they’ll know exactly how to manufacture it. And so I ended up getting a much better product. And this has been my experience in all the healthy companies I’ve worked for. I’ve always gotten a better product from China that I sent in a company that is trying to cut timelines and costs and kill research. I get a worse product from China where I’m like, this finish doesn’t match this and this somehow isn’t fitting together right. And do a good job, give it to them. They’re going to help you in that two to three months of design for manufacturing to make a really great product. And then that two to three months turns into tooling. And I’ve rarely found anybody overseas that will promise tools in less than 35 days. So now you’re another month, to get the tools cut. And now you’re going to have to go through your T0, T1, T2. Other people call them EVT, DVT and PVT. These are essentially just sampling rounds to refine the production. So if you haven’t manufactured a product before, you have to understand every product that you own had literally machines and human processes designed specifically to make that. So while you design a product, your manufacturer is designing an assembly line and they’re designing the jigs and they’re hiring the people and training the people on how to do each thing. And they have to do that, they have to optimize that process on their end. And you don’t even see what’s going on over there. But they’re clearing out their floor, they’re putting in new tables and new racks, they’re building new jigs and mounting them to new tables, they’re hiring people and training those people on exactly how to build your product. And they have to refine that process because you want to be making 2500 of these a day. So that takes time. So in EBT Which is engineering validation Test, dvt, which is design validation test, and pvt, which is production Validation Test, you’re getting better and better and better at making your product. And that takes your developer time. And you’re going to see what you’ll see as the entrepreneurship in that process is samples come through your EBT or your T0 sample is going to have the wrong texture, it’s going to have the wrong color, it might not fit together right, you might not see everything right. And then you got to go crazy. Fine. Tooth comb, red pen marking, everything. This needs to improve, this needs to improve, this needs to grow. This color is not matching, this color, everything. I don’t like this texture. They probably already know that they’re going to get that feedback, but you give them that feedback and they’re not going to get away with anything. Then you get your design validation test. And now we’re testing color, we’re color matching, we’re getting textures figured out, we’re making sure hand feel is right. You come out of DVT to pvt, this is more their production validation where they know that they can get quantity at, the quality that you’ve established in design validation. At this point you probably have 75 prototypes you can’t do anything with because they’re all in process. But it’s wonderful to see all this stuff and this stuff you can take out to your like super users, your small groups, your focus groups, and start testing at these different stages because you still haven’t bought inventory. You can make changes. It’s getting like the cement is drying in each one of these phases, but you’re also getting a higher fidelity prototype than you ever had before that you can validate and make little changes. So you’ve gone through two or three months of design for manufacturing and you have to create space in between each validation test for shipping back and forth and reviewing sometimes design design for Manufacturing can be like a four month process because you have a lot of changes that need to be made or you need to give it to a lot of people to get all the feedback you want. That’s going to be up to you. Like how much risk am I willing to tolerate through that process? I’ve been through design for manufacturing in four weeks per phase, air shipping samples and it’s been fine. But still, as soon as the product lands, we’re putting one in every single employee’s hands and say do nothing for the next two days. Get as much information on this as you can and bring it back to you so we can move this really fast. Like you have to validate those samples. So we’ve already spent like we have like two or three months in DBT or in a design for manufacturing. Before that we had 35 days in tooling. So now we’re four or five months in. Then you got to give them about two weeks to make a shipment. Depending on the complexity of the product, it could be two weeks or a month to, to actually produce your first shipment, whatever your MOQ is, whatever their run rate is that they promised you. And then you have like six weeks on the boat. So even if you have the product completely say like where we started in this process, we have the idea and you’re an entrepreneur who said, I’m going to take this interaction and this technology and this look and I’m going to smash it together and I’m going to go into Mid journey and I’m going to say make something that takes this interaction in this color and mashed it together. And I’m going to send that Mid journey photo to A manufacturer that I heard about from my friend who gets on Alibaba sometimes and we’re going to get to market at the end of the year. You’re still looking at like six months where it’s not even your job, it’s your manufacturer’s job, like six months. So like this takes time. You have to know that before you go into making a product. And it’s complicated but it’s not impossible. And it sounds like a lot of I don’t know how to do all that. You just have to take smaller steps. You know, like I was talking about before, how can you make a small hypothesis and test it today and then tomorrow make another small hypothesis and build a way to test it. That’s all design is, that’s all product development. And design is research and development. It’s like, I have an idea. Build A hypothesis, build an experiment, run the experiment, do that again tomorrow, and you can get through that design phase so fast, so much faster than if you’re just like, okay, I have to sketch today. And once I’m done with the sketching phase, I can do my hand models. And once I do my hand models, I can go into cad. It’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no. How quick can you get to a validation test in any one of those activities? And you should only be doing those activities if it’s going to help you validate an assumption or invalidate hypothesis.
JONATHAN: Thank you for giving all that background, because there were definitely things that I don’t know that I’m always curious about. Like, I know there’s a testing stage. I didn’t know that there were three phases with the, engineering, design, and production. I’m curious, is there. I know you’re very adamant that people do research. I’m curious, is there another point in that process somewhere that you feel people more often than not drop the ball or don’t give it, the attention that it deserves? Or there’s usually that point where things go wrong. Most of the time I’m curious, like, what’s the or. Or I imagine what the answer will be as you’re going to tell me that they’re equally as important as the others. But I’m curious, like, what would you say is kind of the. The blind spot for most entrepreneurs in that process?
KYLE MACDONALD: I think it’s validating and synthesizing early on. People don’t really know how to talk to customers. A lot of people are afraid to approach customers. And, I think a lot of people are afraid to find out what they’re going to find out if they ask customers the hard questions. So I think people avoid validating and talking to customers because it’s the way that an uninitiated customer looks about your product or your prototype. And the way they talk about it, that’s where, like, you find out how. What it means in execution. You know, they’re not going to use the jargon about. I think that this fillet is too big. And the designy engineering stuff. We, we need this to cam. We need a CAM here. So that, I mean, I’m trying to make it so people will understand what I’m saying, but there’s so much jargon that a customer won’t even think about. They’ll twist that thing and say, that felt like sandpaper. I didn’t like that. That is your insight. This should feel smooth. And stiff, not loose and gritty. Great requirement. You got to ask them though. And the reason you got to ask them is because you might be holding a prototype where your mind is completing the picture, but they’ll hold the prototype and their mind will complete it to, to a different destination. You know what I’m saying? It’s like a dashed circle. If you, if, if I gave you like an image of a dashed circle, it’s really easy. All of us would be like, oh, that’s a circle. If I give you an image of scattered straight lines, your mind is going to complete a different than mine. I might make it into a star, you might make it into a tp. So find out what the customer is making that prototype into. How are they completing the picture in their mind? And it’s going to be different than you think and it’s going to hurt your feelings probably.
JONATHAN: That’s so fascinating to me because I feel like that’s the most important part. Like that’s where you’re going to like talking about failing fast. Like that’s where you want to learn all that you can. You mentioned the part about working when you were putting together PRD and the six page story about your fictitious customer, which I love by the way. You talked about how you would work with marketing to talk about, you know, what insights from marketing could you use and, and helping the design along. And I’m curious, is there a point where, because it’s funny thinking about a lot of people I know who go into entrepreneurship kind of started marketing and they always kind of think about it from a marketing perspective. Do you find that, that part of it often? It’s like the tail that wags the dog. Like I feel like the, the marketing piece is always sort of prioritized before the product design piece.
KYLE MACDONALD: I really do find that, all over the place. I mean that’s what was happening with aromatherapists. This was exactly how things operated when I worked at school. Candy too. All the investment, all of like the leadership, it’s all sales and marketing based. I think that’s where most of the people trained in business in America are focused is the point of purchase. It’s like we’re gonna make the sale. We’re getting better and better because of like human centered design and like the, like that becoming like a thing that people are understand or at least like are taught a little bit about in their business school. People are moving back a little further in the process to get in front of the customer. But yeah, I think more often Than not we, we come up with like the tagline that’s going to work before we come up with the product that’s going to work. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It really isn’t. But if you’re not validating it with the product then you, the tail is wagging about I would prefer. And what we did at Thrasio, we called it product led branding where we would find a product opportunity, we would find the customer that needed that product and how to speak to that customer and then we design sort of energetically. Engineers hate this stuff and finance people hate this stuff. But when I’m like, it’s the energy of the product. If you’re not working with marketing you won’t really. It’s harder to get an idea for how this product needs to feel energetically for its customer. So working with marketing is really important in developing the product. But if you start by understanding how the customer wants to feel while using the product, it will give you the tagline. So is there a way in your process as an entrepreneur the way you’re thinking about this just you reverse this and put all of your emphasis on making a product that’s just irreplaceable to your user and then use the irreplaceable experience to create the marketing. And I’m, we’re seeing it actually happening really well on TikTok go look at the way people are selling products on TikTok. It’s just pure product benefit. It’s great. Like, like the marketing is so trimmed down because now all the marketing is in like immediately I see the person selling this product and I relate to that person. That’s my marketing. I feel like that person. But the rest of the marketing is like. And look how happy they are with the way that that product solves their problem. Make a great product and then build your brand around the stories that made the great product. Like what stories did you learn in making a great product? I think that we can be the tail that wags the dog in all of these situations because we assume that this story is going to resonate without making a product that we realize the customer is saying. This actually reminds me of this over here. And you weren’t even thinking about that. So you should be telling that story. Like we need to be listening to how people respond to the product so that we can build really efficient marketing. I’m not saying better marketing or you know, you can do it that way. You can have a really strong brand presence and sell garbage products and still make a lot of money and still please a lot of loyal customers because they’re tied into the value system of your brand. But, if you want to, like, be efficient with your marketing spend and your product development, focus on product experience.
JONATHAN: I mean, just to comment on that real quick, just because I want to, as you and I always talk about. And the part that I find so you’re very passionate about and engaging when you’re talking about it, is just the rituals that products create for customers and how people build their, their lives around certain routines that they have, whether it’s how they use their toothbrush or, you know, what they’re using to cook, whatever it is. And it’s so true in the day and age of social media, where we’re seeing that part of the product and seeing how people will be like, this has changed my life. And now I’m doing this every day. And it is, it’s so compelling. I mean, it’s the most compelling kind of marketing. But I’m curious, like, when thinking about a product design, can you think of an example of where, like, a small, like one small sort of aspect of it kind of tipped it one way or the other, Whether there was some small, like, kind of artistic accent that sort of was the, Achilles heel of the product, or the other way around, where you’re like, you know what? This product doesn’t work. But if we do this, it’s magically fantastic.
KYLE MACDONALD: Yeah, magic is a good word. At Thrasio, we use the term moments of delight. We use magic a lot. Like the moment in the product. A moment is a term used. A lot of interior designers use moment. If you look at a picture of a beautiful home and there’s a desk and a chair plant and an image and color, all of it is chosen and it’s creating a moment. That moment is like that feeling when I see it, like, oh, I feel like I want to write, let me sit there. And that’s. We’re trying to create moments that feel delightful in the product. And that could be little details like you’re talking about. Special sauce is another one that we used all the time. Like what. When we’re in that research phase, we’re, like, looking for the special sauce, the thing that’s going to make people relate more to this product than a different product. And sometimes that special sauce is color choice. Sometimes it’s a formal choice, sometimes it’s marketing language. You know what I mean? But if you’re not inquisitive and allowing the information you’re getting to change your, your idea. You might miss what that moment is or what that magic is because you’re too focused in the pursuit of accomplishing your goal. Just like we talked about. Take this technology and that interaction and this design style. If you’re too set like this is the fix, you’re going to miss where the magic comes from. The magic does come from the consumer. A good example of a ritual, like a magic ritual. I want to speak about ritual a little bit actually.
JONATHAN: Yeah, do it.
KYLE MACDONALD: I feel like it’s actually really, really hard to change consumer behavior. Any product strategist will tell you that, any product, product marketer will tell you that, that like getting somebody to choose this product over that product, that’s changing consumer behavior. That’s really hard. But it’s a little bit easier in a store. You’re making a decision to change the behavior if you nail the right thing. Like if you get the price right, where you get the packaging, right, or you get like the first read on the product right, or the color of the product right. Or whatever it is, you can change consumer behavior at the point of purchase. But it’s way harder, orders of magnitude harder to change behavior in their home. So I’ve kind of stopped trying to create rituals for people. It has become about understanding the rituals that already exist and the mental models that they’ve already built around how to navigate their life and then finding a place where I can insert an improvement like Quip toothbrushes is incredible at this. And they know their market. Kids use regular toothbrushes, grownups use electric toothbrushes. They know that the people buying this product are going to be grown ups with a little extra money. And they spoke directly to a certain type of person, did a really good job of that. And then they didn’t recreate the toothbrush. Like look at how well Whip did in reshaping the toothbrush market. And then look at these people making these like brushes. Brush all your teeth at the same time type of people have been trying to sell that product for like 10 years. It’s not catching on. It’s. That is a new ritual. People aren’t going to change their behavior to brush all their teeth at the same time. But they will change their ritual to get rid of the charging cable that’s all over their sink. Accumulating slobber and toothpaste splatter. Right. Like they want to get rid of that. So improve it, make it stick on the mirror and get rid of the cable. So what did you do? You do when you get rid of the cable, you have to power it somehow. Oh, subscription. They improve the ritual of going to the store and buying new brush heads. It’s that they already have a ritual of replacing their brush head. Just make it a little easier for them, a little better. And they did it with mouthwash, too. Like, part of the ritual of mouthwash is pulling out that nasty buff guy looking Listerine bottle. Why does it look like that? Who designed the Listerine bottle? It needs to look like a, excuse my language, like a barbell. And it’s like, bright green, has bold, lettering. And of course, nobody’s going to leave that on top of their sink. So the ritual of Listerine is open your cabinet, take it out from under the sink next to where your toilet cleaners are, because you don’t want this thing out. And you open the bottle top and it’s covered in, like, dried sugars, coagulated sugars on the outside of this terrible bottle. And then you pour it into that cup and you drink it and swish. And whatever people are, are already doing the mouthwash ritual. They said, how can we make this beautiful? How can we make it easier? How can we make people want to continue this ritual? Can we improve a ritual they already had? And they did it really well with this, like, sort of a nod to a saki ritual with, like, a little sake bottle, a fun little pump on the top, and a beautiful cup, and you leave it out on your thing and it looks like a diffuser or something that should be there and it’s not branded, you know, beautiful. They did a great job. Whip is an excellent example of a consumer goods brand that understood that this is a ritual that exists that has ample opportunity for improvement. When we ask people how it feels to brush your teeth, how does it feel to recharge your toothbrush, how does it feel to mouthwash? And then designing tiny little interactions that are more pleasant, that are delightful moments of play throughout a ritual that already exists. And we can do this in every area of our lives. Every area of our lives is a ritual that has been shaped by what we expect from products.
