Develop & Design

[Philip Fierlinger]

Zero was a design-lead company and that was a real massive competitive advantage, I'd say that was one of its biggest competitive advantages. Starting design by really pushing limits and then bringing it back, and allowing time for design to get ahead and to figure out what are the real opportunities, what is a user experience that people will really, you know, spending time with customers. with users to understand... what's working for them and what's not working for them before you go into code. Because once you go into code, as Craig found out the hard way, it's very time consuming, painful and expensive to then throw away all your code and start all over again.

[Bridgit Hawkins]

The main thing we learned is that when you ask a question, you get the most surprising answers. So, it would generally not what you think that answer is going to be. So, it's so important to go out and ask questions with an open mind rather than just assume that you know -you know what your customers are going to need.

[Philip Fierlinger]

I'm still dumbfounded by the number of startups that don't have a designer, and aren't putting enough time and energy into that design phase. And they- they keep just pumping out product rather than focusing on what should we build, what should we be building. That's more important than just pumping out things that nobody is going to use, that isn't the right solution, that isn't groundbreaking, that isn't going to disrupt the market.

[Timothy Allan]

Design is part of the fabric of UBCO, like I'm a designer, I have a design background, my life is a creative one. Daryl's a designer, Anthony's a really creative person, so we sort of had this, you know, creative start and have just embedded it into the way the company operates.

We have to prove that for the customer the product works, that's the first and foremost objective. And then you're then building out, you know, how we apply you know the different levels of design, but a design is a very three-dimensional concept because, you know, we've got a fully assembled product that can be shipped direct to an end-consumer, and it's signed off by NZTZ that you can basically, out of the box, without a dealer, without a technician, without a mechanic, out of a box, you can basically take that and be writing it in 10 minutes. That takes design.

We took the approach that you've got to get something out, and by doing that you cannot be perfect, you're not going to be, so there are things that you're going to learn, and some of them are, you know, they are very painful and hard, I mean like probably for us, product durability in the environments we're in, it's pretty intense. I mean it's 365 days a year, rain, hail or sunshine, covered in influent and mud. And you- you've got a product that's used by people that quite often don't really look after it, and so that side of things was incredibly hard to iterate the product to where it is today. And we probably... we burned through it just by being very disciplined and perseverance so it's basically like everything that came up it was just basically improve, improve, improve, improve, which then everything we change basically has a product corrective request in production. So, you know if you take a look at production for us we probably are not liked by production, but I'm not going to apologize for it because we have to improve the product every single month, every single year. Like we definitely had products fail and you have to rapidly learn from that and turn that around to something that made the product better, so I think over the period of five years, you've now got a product that can survive, honestly, in the environments that it's gone into.

The quietness for us at an early stage was really important because you didn't think about it when you first started. But when you remove the vehicle noise from someone and they're sitting on a vehicle for 6 to 7 hours a day, it's reasonably life-changing, right, it's quite annoying to have a drone of a thing just constantly there, when you remove it it's just like- like I can hear my dog, I can hear the birds, I can you know I can more actively feel like I'm part of my environment. So, you know but I think the vehicle- because it is different, it means that then we were confronted with a whole lot of really specific engineering challenges because of the fact that it's not been done before in the application a we're using, and that's really where the hurdles come in and you've got to be committed to that pathway you've chosen which then presented us those other opportunities. Because again, the vehicle structure gave us portable power like I couldn't hear today say okay well we're about to launch a full portable power supply that would not have been possible if it wasn't for the approach that we took. For, you know, two hub wheels and no center motor and a belt or a chain drive, so I think the- by doing things differently, it unlocks things, it certainly creates a lot of hurdles but the silver lining as if you can successfully achieve and resolve those problems, you're then somewhere very different, from where all these other companies are. So you're almost like inhabiting your own terrain.

It's probably not allowing yourself to relax, I think is the big thing, because if you do you're just going to stop improving the product, and you have to be prepared. Like the thing in 2014, like there's zero loss to the risk you take right, whereas today there's a lot more loss to be made for the risk you take, but you have to approach it the same way that you did in 2014, because if you don't, like we say electric vehicles are 3% of the market globally today. Like you know the- and that's supposed to get to 54% by 2030 that's a very long way to go so you've got to keep being as aggressive and as risk-taking as you were but you've just got to develop the way that you take risk to be more calculated more premeditated and you've got to use the tools in a way that can allow you to kind of perhaps make the mistakes in your own domain before you put a product out into production.

[Ross Pearce]

Developing and designing of products are very complex process, but one of the big failings I see is becoming precious about the thing that you're working on, and not being pragmatic enough to make hard decisions. And often you'll see people who will develop a product because they passionately believe in it, and then to find that it fails in the marketplace. And there are so many other complexities around product development, and if you've got- if you're making a physical product, you've got to make it somehow and the challenges around that, in a rapidly evolving technology landscape, are quite tricky at the moment. There are great opportunities in that through automation, like soft manufacturing, 3D printing, all of these things now are making it much more democratic than it used to be in the past. You don't have- necessarily have a big investment behind that to get things going. You can use some of these technologies to start the process and test the market before you seriously invest heavily in hard tooling or complex manufacturing processes.

One of the other things- and people are starting to be quite good at this, is co-designing. So, if you're designing something for a particular customer, then you're involving them in that design process, and you're doing it in an incremental way, so that you're not exposing yourself to too much risk by taking too big a step that you're moving away from customer- I suppose value, but constantly balancing that against the business value. So, you don't want to design something that's going to be really expensive to make because it's a fantastic proposition to the customer, they would really value it, but you could never sell it at that price point. So, this constant every day, you're making decide design decisions which are balancing those two tensions. So, it's a real art, and it takes more than a person to do that, it requires a team, and innovations, a real team effort across all the business functions, and I think that's a failing perhaps for a lot of product development is that it doesn't include all the other people across the business who play an important part in helping make that successful from the get-go. It's no good developing the product and then throwing it to them expecting them to make it successful.

If you're building a pro- designing a product for today. Today- it's not for today, it's for a future date when it goes into the market, so even three years out now, there's going to be a big shift in the business environment you're releasing that into, so you need to start thinking about that now. And today, you have to have an understanding of what that business environment is going to be like in three- or five-year's time when your products in the market. And I think a lot of people don't get that. They're designing today for today, not for the market it's going to be in.

[Clare Foggo]

With the online trademark website, one of the things we wanted to do from the very beginning was to keep it really simple. So, we reduced, sort of, all the steps that they needed to take to register a trademark, really down to three steps. Part of that design thinking was, you know, not giving people too many options that's going to confuse them and so um, you know, I think that's something that on, you know, for those trademark registration websites we've done really well.

[Ross Pearce]

Within the design process, you really have to bring in at the beginning all those regulatory things that you need to address as you work through the design itself. It will- it will be informing some of the regulations that you might need to meet, and vice versa the regulations will start informing what the product needs to look like and some of the behaviors that it has to meet in order to be allowed to be sold into the markets that you're going into. So often we see people leaving that right to the last part of the design process, only to discover that actually what we've designed doesn't meet the requirement. So, we have to loop back, and it just takes time and money to do that. And in some cases, it actually kills the product.

The other part of this is the IP part. At what point do you patent something, because you've got to understand the costs and the costs of having a patent is not just the... monetary cost of maintaining that, and that can be quite high, we can be talking about half a million a year, depending on what countries or markets you're going into. But it's also the cost of publishing your secret source as it were, because unless you can defend it, all you've done is give it away to your competition and unless you can you can register it in all the markets you're going into, which is probably unlikely because of the cost. That means that in those other markets where you haven't protected it it's free reign, anybody can take it and use it in those markets, so you need really need to think pretty carefully about what you patent and what you don't, and where, you know, how lies- where your intellectual assets come to play in terms of building value.

[Mahmood Hikmet]

I think if you're involved in any, sort of, computer or software engineering these days, finding the fastest path to failure is one of the most important things that you can do. When you fail at something, it's not necessarily a bad thing. As a software engineer you need to find ways of failing multiple times in a single day if you've written a bug, you need to figure out where that bug is, where that failure is, so that you end up making that program better. Tthe way we look at failure is we see it as an opportunity.

[Aroha Armstrong]

One of the common things that we see is that people are racing off down to design their product, and sometimes there is- there can be a lack of understanding of what the type of advice or expertise is around them to help them do that really really well. For instance, um what is an industrial designer? So, entrepreneurial spirits tend to just DIY it, number eight wire it, do it themselves, and there's a real trap there that you can actually spend more money and more time doing it yourself.

[Sam Gribben]

What you need to really look at is what a customer is saying about your product, you know. I think that quite often... well they don't know about that, they don't know about the things that you've got in mind for where it could go. And what they do know about is what works and what doesn't work. And you need to really get into the minds of the customers as early as you can and kind of, yes, keep your vision of where it's going to go but don't get too sidetracked with like "okay, customers I'll be right with you, I've just I've just got to build this thing it's going to be epic I'll be back in 5 years and it'll be... it'll blow your minds". And just like really get in and find out what is the core of the problem that you're solving, what's the core value, what is the thing that they really really like.

[Angie Judge]

You've got to lead with as much context into that picture as you possibly can. You've got to be prototyping not just in traditional ways of prototyping but with things like live data prototypes to really help your customers understand the value and work out if they're getting to that sort of 'aha' point with your product. You've got to be testing for not just feasibility and viability and value, but you've also got to be looking at things like ethics and user experience. And so, one of the things that we've taken away from all of this is simply to invest as much energy as you do in how you build, as you do in what you're building.

[Angie Judge]

One of our positions in the industry is we always try and lead with the vision of the change that we want to see in the world, and for us that is getting an industry to go from gut-feel to insight-inspired, and we put out that change and that vision of what we want to see in the world in so many different ways. It is for us, putting on master classes, and webinars, holding a podcast, we write lots of blogs, we have downloadable playbooks that our customers can get off our website. And by painting that picture, um we design a future that that customer buys into, and our software becomes a part of how they get to that future, it's not the only part of that journey for them. But it's such an important part I think to be able to see what success looks like.