Author: Montie Roland

Hey All,

I just wanted to let you know that our Grand Opening and Expo is coming soon. Please take an afternoon out to enjoy good food, tour our new facility, and meet local product design/prototyping vendors. The event is free.

See you there.

Montie

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Event: Grand Opening / Pig Pickin / Vendor Day for:

Montie Design

101 Machine

Better Business Advice

RTP Product Design Guild

Date: Saturday, 4 Aug 07

Time: 3:00 until 6:30

Location: 400 Dominion Dr., Suite 101, Morrisville, NC 27560

Description: Join us in celebrating the co-location of:

RTP Product Design Guild
Montie Design
101Machine
Good Business Advice

Stroll through the various outdoor vendor booths including:

– Montie Design – product design
– 101Machine – prototype machining
– Good Business Advice – business ansurance and financial mgmt
– RTP Product Design Guild – community-based design
– Pioneer Strategies – public relations
– Fineline Prototyping – rapid prototyping service bureau
– ADR Hydrocut – waterjet cutting house
– Applied Technologies – product design

Bring your family and join us for an afternoon of fun! Please dont hesitate to send any questions to: montie@montie.com

Register (free) at: http://productdesignguild.eventbrite.com/

Morning Fellow Product Designers,

I thought this event might interest many of you.

Montie

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Event: “New Product Development in the Entrepreneurial Enterprise”

Date: 14 Jun 07

Time: 6-8:30pm

• Networking & Registration 6 – 6:45 pm
• Presentation and Q&A 6:45 8:00 pm
• Pizza and drinks will be served

Location: MCNC auditorium in RTP, NC

Speaker: Bob Luddy, President, CaptiveAire and founder, Franklin Park Industrial Center

Co-Hosted by: CED

New Product Development in the Entrepreneurial Enterprise

Unless your business changes, your business will die. Changing means developing new products. But what new products? Why one product over another? Where do you begin?

Learn what inspired Robert Luddy, lifelong entrepreneur and president of Raleigh-based CaptiveAire Systems – the nations well-respected manufacturer of commercial kitchen ventilation equipment. Luddy founded CaptiveAire in 1976 on $1,300 capital. Today, CaptiveAire employs 650 people in four plants and 57 offices in the U.S. and Canada. It is continually voted ?Best In Class? by industry dealers and consultants, according to Foodservice Equipment & Supplies magazine. INC. magazine has repeatedly named CaptiveAire one of the 500 fastest growing private companies in the nation. In North Carolina, CaptiveAire is among the 100 largest private companies (Business North Carolina magazine), and it is the 10^th fastest growing private company in the Raleigh Triangle (Triangle Business Journal).

Learn and discuss with Bob:

• How you can revolutionize your industry.

Bob will cover these and many other topics, including responding quickly to market demand. Please join us to exchange points of view, build relationships with your peers and as gain insights from our speaker:

Robert Luddy is a lifelong entrepreneur. At the age of 20, while attending LaSalle University in Philadelphia, Bob opened a fiberglass manufacturing business and worked at night. In 1967, Bob sold his company and was drafted into the military. In 1976, Bob settled in Raleigh, and with $1,300 capital, he opened Atlantic Fire Systems in a one-room facility. Recognizing the demand for high-quality kitchen ventilation equipment, Bob purchased a sheet metal shop in 1981 and transformed it into CaptiveAire Systems, Inc. CaptiveAire is now the nations largest manufacturer of commercial kitchen ventilation systems, with sales reaching $180 million in 2006. In addition to CaptiveAire, Bob Luddy drives other economic development in the area. Bob founded and developed the Franklin Park Industrial Center, which has drawn over 15 entrepreneurial businesses and hundreds of jobs to Franklin and Wake counties.

Questions? Send an e-mail to montie@montie.com

Morning,

I thought this might interest many of you. The event is taught by the Brand Manager of Lenovo. You can sign up at http://pdma2.eventbrite.com. More information about the event is available at www.pdma.org/carolinas. Detailed information about the event follows.

Cheers,
Montie

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We take networking seriously and innovation is a lot of fun, so what could be better than combining the two?

Join us for an evening of networking and innovation. The evening will begin with beer, pizza, and business card exchange, then we will get an introduction to Systematic Innovation, and then we will split into teams and have some fun innovating some products. Those who have most fun will even win a prize!

About Systematic Innovation (SI): some call it innovation by templates and there is some truth to that even though on the surface the notions of templates and creativity appear to be an oxymoron. However, when you think about it, we may subconsciously use learned templates in our creative thinking anyway. SI techniques attempt to come up with such templates and they can be quite effective tools in stimulating creative thinking that result in innovative solutions. A most visible SI technique is TRIZ, a technique used by companies such as Ford, Procter & Gamble, Eli Lilly, 3M, and Samsung.

This session will be led by Stacey Baer from Lenovo and Shimon Shmueli from Touch360.
See bios below.

Who Should Attend Product managers, engineers, designers, and marketing managers.

Stacey Baer, Ph.D., Lenovo

Currently the corporate Brand Manager of the international PC manufacturer Lenovo, Staceys primary responsibilities are to manage the Lenovo and ThinkPad brands. Her responsibilities also include branding strategies, product & brand naming, and trademark management.

Stacey received a BA in Psychology in 1986 from Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, and then went on to get a Masters of Science (1989) and Doctoral degree (1996) in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Kentucky.

Stacey was hired by the PC division of IBM in 1992 as the lead Human Factors engineer for IBMs PC brands. Her product responsibilities over the next few years included the PS/2, Aptiva and then the ThinkPad brands.

In 1998, Stacey became the first Customer Experience Strategist for the IBM company. She had world-wide responsibility for defining end-to-end customer experience strategies, first for all ThinkPad products and then later for all the PC Divisions customer-facing device brands.

In 2003, Stacey received an Executive MBA from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. She became the WW Brand Manager of IBMs PC Division, and then the Corporate Brand Manager for Lenovo after the PC Division was sold to Lenovo in 2005.

Shimon Shmueli, Touch360

Shimon is the founder of Touch360 where he leads product development, innovation and design, and technology and business strategies.

Before founding Touch360, Shimon was with IBM, where he held various leadership positions, among them as worldwide marketing segment manager for PC products, worldwide product manager for the ThinkPad line of consumer notebooks and accessories, and leading the development of new mobile platforms.

Shimon was a co-founder and CTO at KeyNetica, a company that pioneered the use of the USB Flash Drive as a mobile platform. He also served as a marketing and business strategy consultant and as adjunct professor at George Mason University where he taught graduate marketing classes.

Shimon holds an engineering degree from the Technion in Israel; an MSEE/CS degree from Polytechnic in New York; and an MBA from Wake Forest University. Always a student, he is currently pursuing graduate studies in industrial design at North Carolina State University.

Shimon has been a speaker and mentor in various forums, including Taiwan Design Center, Johns Hopkins University, and Virginia Tech School of Architecture & Design. He is a professional member of IDSA, IEEE, HFES, DMI, and PDMA.

Intellectual Property – The Top 10 Things You Need to be Aware of When Developing and Bringing a New Product to Market

The Carolinas Chapter of the Product Development and Management Association invites you to kick off its 2007 professional program and tackle the important issue of intellectual property with Tracy-Gene Durkin, Director of renowned Washington-DC IP law firm Sterne Kessler Goldstein Fox.

Using case studies, Tracy will highlight the problems that arise when intellectual property issues are not considered in advance and fully integrated in the product development process. She will cover topics including joint development, protecting product configuration, and protecting IP internally, critical dates to keep in mind in the patent process, and proper documentation of invention dates, among others.

We will have in-house perspective as well from a Durham-based organization that helps pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.

Please join us to exchange points of views and build relationships with your peers as well as gain insights from our speaker:

Tracy-Gene G. Durkin, is a director in and heads the Mechanical Patent and Trademark Group of Sterne Kessler Goldstein Fox. She has over twenty years of experience obtaining and enforcing worldwide intellectual property rights, including utility and design patents, trademarks and copyrights. Ms. Durkins client counseling experience includes helping clear new products and trademarks for use in the marketplace, selecting appropriate IP protection, and enforcing such protection through mediation, litigation and licensing. Ms. Durkin has spoken internationally on topics such as design patents, IP audits, mediation, IP protection on the Internet, and trademark co-branding and licensing for non profit organizations. She is Chair of the Industrial Design Committee for the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA) and a member of the Industrial Designs Committee of the Intellectual Property Owners Association.

Who Should Attend

Product managers, engineers, designers, and business managers. This event qualifies as 2 Professional Development Hours toward PDMAs NPDP recertification.

Date Thursday, February 22nd, 2007

Time Networking & Registration 6-6:45 pm; Presentation and Q&A 6:45 8:00 pm; Pizza and drinks.

Location MNMC Auditorium, 3021 Cornwallis Rd, Research Triangle Park (Durham), NC 27709.

Fees $20 members, $35 non-members, $10 students and volunteers. $10 additional for walk-in. Cash or check only. Fees include handouts.

Registration Online at http://pdma.eventbrite.com

View from the Gap Trail on Mount Mitchell in North Carolina

Morning,

This podcast is in response to some of the e-mails that I received about the earlier podcast about “Camping From The Viewpoint Of A Product Designer. Both of the audio segments below address learning points from the discourse on camping as a product. The audio was recorded in two different days. My plan was to make one long podcast. However, the two different recordings took two different directions, so I decided to make two podcasts from them. If you havent listened to the earlier podcast on camping, you might want to do that before diving into these.

Have a great Monday!

Sincerely,
Montie Roland

President – Montie Design (www.montie.com)
President, Carolinas Chapter of the PDMA (www.pdma.org/carolinas)
Home of the NC Product Design Directory

Process may be king in our industry, but vision is the treasury behind the throne room. Product developers can find detailed processes in books, or even from internal ISO procedures. Executing that process is one of the difficult parts of managing product development.

Vision, is almost a dirty word at times. Vision can blind you. Vision can guide you. Vision can lead you to the most successful product your organization has ever had.

Balancing vision and process is extremely important for long term success. The attached podcast (17 minutes, 9 seconds in length) discusses this issue. Comments and suggestions are always welcome. You can leave them here, or send an email to montie@montie.com.

Have a Great Day!

Montie Roland

President – Montie Design (www.montie.com)
President, Carolinas Chapter of the PDMA (www.pdma.org/carolinas)
Home of the NC Product Design Directory

Morning,

I received an e-mail last night from a fellow product developer. He is Taiwan giving a talk about “Design for Experience” and designing electronics for the American consumer market. He posed the following question:

Can you identify, from your own intuition or knowledge, top 2-3 customer behavior or cultural trends that affect the US consumer when buying electronic products? Just as an example, are Americans becoming less brand-loyal because they have more comparison data available to them?

Responding to his e-mail resulted in the following thoughts about trends and the American consumer:

Dissatisfaction with Overly Complex Products

These are products that arent well designed. They have difficult interfaces; probably where some engineer demanded a whole bunch of extra features at the expense of usability. They may also be products where the designers and engineers didnt have a vision for an easy-to-use product, i.e. they didnt design for experience.

ABC News reported that “complexity causes 50% of product returns”. They went on to say:

The average consumer in the United States will struggle for 20 minutes to get a device working, before giving up, the study found.

Product developers, brought in to witness the struggles of average consumers, were astounded by the havoc they created.

She also gave new products to a group of managers from consumer electronics company Philips, asking them to use them over the weekend. The managers returned frustrated because they could not get the devices to work properly.

Most of the flaws found their origin in the first phase of the design process: product definition, Den Ouden found.

The entire article can be read at:

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/print?id=1691901

When this happens, products get returned (which is horribly expense to the manufacturer and the reseller). When a customer returns a difficult to use product, it is likely they will try a less expense model (with less features / complexity).

New is Better Mentality

This a potential trap is a trap for product designers and manufacturers. If you are a manufacturer and you assume that your product will have a usable lifetime of two years, then you will have some percentage of products that just plain wear out before then. This leads customers to believe that it was a crappy product and they may look for another manufacturers product when they replace the item. This is a trend that I believe is hurting Apple in the MP3 market. This is a very competitive market where word about their product failures (not many, but enough) has given them a black eye at the time when some people (new is better folks) are considering upgrading their players. Apple has a great product, but their product failures (less than 2% of products) are widely known. These failures are often an excuse for teenagers who want to move to the “new is better” (i.e. the Zune).

Culture of the Online Review is Here

There a now many websites that allow consumers to review the products that they purchase. However, this open environment can be a double-edged sword. Apple actually allows product reviews and discussions on the www.apple.com website. If you dont embrace your user group, then it is likely that some ambitious webmaster will (and you lose the ability to do it on your own in a meaningful way). The internet is here, online reviews are here to stay. Here are some ways that you can make the most of the opportunities:

A) Allow negative remarks

Every so often, Clark Howard (a radio personality at www.clarkhoward.com) reads some of the negative remarks from his forums on the radio. Many of his listeners are extremely loyal. This type of transparent behavior, on his part, only substantiates the philosophy of customer service and company tranparency (when it comes to customers) that he preaches.

B) Respond to criticism with product improvements

If you make design changes (of the next round of products) based on on-line feedback, then tell your online users what you did. Thank them for the input. A note from a company president on the relevant forum, thanking someone for their feedback just created customers for life and probably evangelical ones at that.

C) Dont blow off your online reviewers as “kooks”

Granted there is always some “dissatifed at life individual” whom no one can please, but other online reviewers pick up on that an discount most of those opinions. Look for two things in the online reviews.
Identify real issues that the users face in operating your product. Most importantly look for work arounds that users develop for product definciencies. Customer work arounds are your customers doing your creative work for you. Evaluate each customer work around very carefully. They are a potential gold mine of product improvements. Some work arounds may lead to you design new accessories (which represent the potential for follow on income and extended product sales life). Other work arounds may lead you to significant, or minor, product design changes.

D) Never, no never, lash out at online reviewers

The truth is the truth no matter who states it, or how it is stated. Many people get rude and overly critical when posting online. They say things they would never say in person. Look for the truth, understanding that most online reviews will be negative.

E) Understand lurking

Only of a small percentage of online viewers will ever actually post in the forums. This is called lurking. Lurking is where you look, but never post. If you are doing well 1-3% of your visitors will post. Any percentage higher than 3% should be considered as a huge success. Low lurking percentage means that you have a highly involved user community.

F) Be bold and consistent over the long run!

Lets say a customer is complaining the product needs some easily added feature (easily added if you are designing from scratch). Maybe you could even implement this feature with a change in firmware. Once you make the firmware change you have to test, distribute etc. Making this change requires resources that you are currently using on the next generation product. If you make this change, you potentially slow down the release of the next generation of product.

To make it worse, in a meeting a couple of years ago, someone suggested this feature. However, it was deemed more important to spend time on other features. So now you are faced with a decision. Do I slow down the new product to implement a “customer relations” change, or do I just keep going and forget about the potential improvement. If you go on with the new product, getting to market quickly is important. However, adding the feature to the current represents a potential win amoung the user / customer base.

It is much easier to sell to an existing customer than find new ones. Jay Conrad Levinson talks about this in the book “Guerilla Marketing”. You can find out where to purchase the book at www.gmarketing.com. As we all know, because of the customer, marketing and product design are intimately related. Why have to spend all the money to find new customers, when the existing customers are already there. Promoting on-line reviews can help sell the next round of products as well as sell products today. Promoting this type of activity helps marketing and sales, but should be driven by the product managers and designers for maximum value (i.e. return of investment).
If you implement the new feature in the current product, then do it quickly. This type of response is appreciated by the person suggesting the improvement. In these days of “customer diservice” other readers will be amazed at how responsive the manufacturer is to their opinons and suggestions. Maybe your programmers would appreciate the opportunity to directly impact customers by being responsive to customer feedback. Maybe this responsiveness is part of a company-wide attitude of excellence.

Communicate the addition of th new feature to the customer(s) who suggested it. Maybe make him, or her, a celebrity amoung the other users. Maybe put him in the next commercial. Maybe let him send out a mailer, or e-mail, (under your supervision) to all of the registered users.

This type of boldness isnt tolerated in many companies, so you may not be able to pull this off in your organization. Many users would be thrilled with smaller gestures (less risky) from the manufacturer. Assigning a product manager the collateral duty of just responding to customer comments could make a huge difference in how your product is perceived in the broader market. This is especially true with the rise in popularity, and credibility, of the blogosphere. At the same time, that product manager has his finger on the pulse of a portion of the user community. That can translate to design wins on future products.

Whatever you do, make sure that you do it consistently and continue the user relations campaign for an extended period of time. Starting a user relations campaign up and suddenly going silent may do more damage than doing nothing. You can read more about public relations consistentcy on Frank Williams (Pioneer Strategies) blog at
http://www.pioneerstrategies.com/newsltr_oct04.htm and http://www.pioneerstrategies.com/newsltr_may04.htm.

Consistentcy, longevity, and a passion to be an advocate for the customer are the keys to making the most of these opportunities.

As always, you comments and suggestions are welcome. Please dont hesitate to leave a comment here, or send an e-mail to montie@montie.com.

Best Regards,
Montie Roland
President – Montie Design (www.montie.com)
President, Carolinas Chapter of the PDMA (www.pdma.org/carolinas)
Home of the NC Product Design Directory

Yesterday, Dec 1st, I had the opportunity of attending a quarterly leadship forum sponsored by Pioneer Strategies in Raleigh, NC. The speaker, Bob Luddy, is a regional business success story. Some of what I took away from the conference is in the podcast below.

Your comments and suggestions are always welcome. You can post your comments here, or send an e-mail to montie@montie.com.

Best Regards,
Montie Roland
President, Montie Design
President, Carolinas Chapter PDMA

The last four weeks have contained much dinner time discussion about my step-son ditching the Xbox 360 (all of six weeks old, which he bought with money that he earned) to buy the new, cool PlayStation3. You may be asking what does this have to do with product design management. Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony are competing over the console space. A game console is a thinly-disguised computer that hooks up to your TV to play games. When I was growing up the console space was brand new and was dominated by Atari. Later generations of game consoles boiled down to a console war between Nintendo and Sega. Sega lost. The latest consoles are the Sony Playstation3 (Sony), Xbox 360 (Microsoft), and the Wii (Nintendo).

The Sony Playstation3 has cutting-edge graphics and physics powered by the IBM cell processor. The XBox 360 is a year old now and doesnt quite have the graphics horsepower that the Playstation has. However, it does have a very successful on-line component called Xbox Live. The Sony costs from $500-600. The Xbox costs from $400-500. The Wii costs from $200-300 and doesnt have the graphics (or physics) horsepower of either of its competitors.

The Wii does have a very innovative controller that was designed to make game play easier. Both the Playstation3 and the XBox controllers are button farms. They can be difficult to use. The other Wii advantage is its emphasis on ease-of-play. The system was designed to make game play easy. Making it easier makes it more attractive to a wider audience, and not just hard-core gamers. Nintendos plan is to design a better experience for a broader audience.

My step-son (age 16) test played the Wii last night. When he got home, he was raving about how great the Wii was. When I asked how it could be that great he said; “I like the way it played”. This goes back to exactly what Shimon (www.Touch360.com) has been saying about designing for experience: https://montie.com/PDMA/2006_sept_event.

The Wii, it doesnt have the sheer computing power of the PlayStation 3, but it does have a well-designed experience. We, as product designers and managers, should strive for similar forms of design excellence. It isnt always about additional features and more performance. Elegance can be difficult to achieve, but the result is usually worth the effort especially if you are the end user.

As always, comments and suggestions are welcome.

Montie Roland
President – Montie Design (ww.montie.com)
President – Carolinas PDMA (www.pdma.org/carolinas)