Product Management: Top Ways to Successfully Market New Technology Products in Silicon Valley 2022

get started now yes okay first of all i'd like to tell you about what's coming next month joanne moody will be talking about adhesive challenges with wearables there are a lot of wearables that are attached to the skin uh could be a on the chest but it could be anywhere else a lot of devices use adhesives and adhesives with skin there are a lot of challenges and this is what joanne is an expert at so this should be a very interesting talk as i mentioned after the presentation i'd like to give everyone a chance to introduce themselves and to meet others and keep in mind that networking is one of the most important things you can do this is something i learned quite a few years ago and it had a dramatic impact on myself and my company and whether you're an engineer or somebody who specializes in meeting people like a salesperson uh having a good network is valuable so we'd like to try and help you develop your network this is a chance to listen to a brief introduction from each of the people who are attending for those who wish to you can spend about 10 or 15 seconds say your name and why you're an interesting person to get to know and you can listen to what the others say and we will facilitate the follow-up at the end if you don't have their contact information now you can reach people who are in meetup directly but brian and i will make sure that you can contact anybody that you want to network with absolutely oh absolutely yeah agreeing with you okay today we're fortunate to have jessica ching she's going to talk about how to successfully bring a product to market and she's got a lot of experience in this area she's an expert in marketing both for medical and consumer products in other areas and she's got expertise in a lot of different areas in marketing product development and adoption market assessment brand strategy product launch and introduction marketing communications and operations so this is broader than your typical marketing person so let's take it away i'll stop sharing my screen and jessica go ahead hi everyone it is a great day today and i'm really excited to be here speaking to all of you and it looks like we're going to have 30 people online which is really awesome because i'm going to share with you some of the things i've learned over my career and working in three industries three different industries doing product development and marketing but i'm also excited to hear some of your experiences as well so i'm going to ask brian to put up some slides they're mostly just little visual cues that you can look at as you're listening to me um let me admit these two people while brian putting up the slides and uh we'll get started all right so let me share here we go and let me get to the powerpoint view here all right all right there we go so you probably saw on the uh little blurb that went out about the summary about what i'm talking about the first line says is your r d on mute which is pretty apt for this meeting because we were sort of fiddling around with the controls but i think that's a really great way to describe what sort of in a package what we're going to talk about so if you move to the next slide i had been thinking about what it is that we all want to do today in our lives we have these dreams when we are all in silicon valley we live in this mecca of just great innovation we want to build a team work a startup life i was going to say live a startup life but we all know that living a startup life means you're going to be working a lot and then build something that just hits a home run out of the park and create a legacy that is uh i think a lot of our dreams and it's what i'm going to be talking about today to try and help you get to that next slide please so this is just a little bit more about me i'm a product development and marketing and business unit uh manager as as walt mentioned um and i am currently focused um in the area of medical devices so in my career i've worked in several different industries i started out in automotive product development then i moved to computers and consumer electronics and then about 15 years ago i moved into medical devices always on the consumer medical and the consumer health side of devices and that is really where i play and where my heart is so you'll hear some of my references for this it's also actually a great area of opportunity especially with the convergence that we see in these days with consumer devices and medical devices they are becoming practically one of the same so let's move to the next slide where i want to talk about new technology so when you read about this meetup you read about how new technology can enable that new product that you want to build that home run that you want to hit that dream that you want to fulfill technology is exciting it's innovative it's full of possibility and potential and it is definitely an enabling force it can be just one component or even a small software advance or put together an entirely new system sometimes we have leap frogs especially we see that these days technology is sexy and needed but it is really also the backbone of our society yet all of these new capabilities don't at all guarantee that we'll have better products that result in more sales profit experience or brand value and therefore not necessarily guarantee excuse me not guarantee a way to fulfill our dream so the question here is how do we leverage technology can we leverage these tools to bring something faster lighter more seamless easier better value or even just what we all really want which is more enjoyable next slide please well that leads me to this topic here um i think if you hit enter a few times all the rest of the reasons will come out so where is the opportunity and the opportunity struck me actually comes out of some of these lessons of failure i pulled up in analyst view they had interviewed 111 startup postmortems since 2018 and here are the top nine you see that the answer here might well be number two not just online of them but specifically number two because i think a lot of the failures here in the gray are also related to number two um i wanted to point this out as well um if you look at this top nine list it's certainly things that we've all heard about but you notice that number two is no market need versus number nine is actually a poor product it's not at the top of the list so where do we start given this opportunity let's go to the next slide you won't be surprised to hear a marketer say that you should start with your customers and we know this we know we're supposed to build for our customers we know we're supposed to listen to them we know that we're supposed to take their their needs and their wants and and considerations in but really how deeply we do it and how far broadly across the entire spectrum of our business do we do this do we even go to the extent of validating uh what they say they believe or what they say they want or they need and then move ahead with development and then do we check and validate again and then do we do that again because really doing this opens the gate for each new phase of development so one of the key points that i'm going to keep pounding in here is that talking to your customer and understanding your customer understanding your market and taking their needs into account is not only broad it encompasses everything that you do in your business but it happens at every stage of development especially at the keys now i want to make a point here that you don't want to wait to get to your mvp to check if you're on track because by then you will have spent a lot of money and time and resources your customers and their needs and the entire focus ideally would be woven into each part of your development plans so that they're really an inseparable part of the fabric of what you're creating next slide please so i'd like to move right into this this is a key action that i call it check the market define your competition and here's the point to make sure that you identify your customers or your competitors excuse me as your customers see them because what you believe is a competitor might be different from what your customers believe are competitors your competition can be direct and indirect and the reason i have a picture of this miata here is when we were doing the development of this car it's the single most successful car in the history of the automotive industry by sales of a single model so this car ran for a long time i think it was 10 years before the update came out so it had a long time to do that but in the early days when the car was very hot and selling for over sticker price we wanted to make sure we were in line with the competition because there's a lot of feature for feature matching and price to price and that type of thing that goes on so we got together a group of maybe around 30 car enthusiast opinion leaders who are the early adopters that had first bought the car and i wanted to know what else did you consider in addition to buying this miata so these image leaders of course are the spokespeople for your brand they're the ones that have the most money they could buy a lot more but they choose your product so i wanted to know did they consider a mustang convertible at the time there was a chrysler convertible on the market an rx-7 convertible even i think of porsche convertibles there weren't that many maybe of another british roadster what do you think they said which car did they pick well the first answer that came out was a trip to cabo i said no no transportation so the next guy said a pair of jet skis and then the next guy said well i can i was going to buy the car or a super computer set up in my living room so we could have an in-house gaming network very interesting and basically went around the room and had another group of people three hours later and they said the same thing basically what we found was the quote competitors to the miata was other recreational purchases in the 10 to 15 000 range so that is a really great example i've never forgotten that about how a customer defines its competition and it might not be the same way that you think of it next slide so this is a graphic uh from somewhere that i pulled out and it's a market analysis for smart clothing so that's not necessarily what i'm going to talk about today but for products other than something like a miata which is a very aspirational purchase you still need to know where you're going to compete it's pretty unusual that you have a fifteen thousand dollar piece of transportation and it competes with a trip to cabo san lucas most products compete a little bit more directly in their segment and from the graphic that you can see here even within that there can be a lot of competitors this one is segmented by type of competitor but assessing your market landscape is really a first step in getting to know your customer because who is playing in the space and how far they are and how quickly they might be moving toward your space tells you a lot about people who could be your customers too so you want to know who else uh who else meaning what other companies or products are entering your market space is it something where people are coming in quickly or is it something where it's fairly you know a slow pace um what are they offering what are these other companies and products what are they offering how are they positioning themselves and interestingly also who are they targeting what does their product portfolio and their roadmap look like that's a very interesting some companies stay very broad or very uh narrow pure play and others go broad but if you dig through that you can often find some interesting strategies in that another thing i look for in a market landscape is what kinds of alliances that companies have formed or are likely to form i also look at their strengths and their weaknesses and most importantly i look at uh so for example in the middle of this i probably would have put a big yellow circle where my product would be what is my position relative to these other players and i think these positioning maps are among the most useful of all types of tools so it really helps you get to your customers and to get a view of what your customers are doing who they might be and how you might find them so if we go to the next slide let's talk about customers directly there are all sorts of activities to be conducted around customers assessment targeting segmentation profiles all kinds of testing both in the product itself the concept um even the messaging and the positioning but it get you know this is a broad range of activities and most people ask me well where do i start and i think for me the place to start a good place to start is with a market requirements document you may have heard of this term in mrd which lists all of the types of activities and comprehensive around the forces that are likely to impact your product in the market um you would look at the background of an industry or market um which will point to the trends and why the the needs that you feel that are your pro your product is solving uh why they exist um it really alludes to a target customer persona or profile this would be an actual representative person that helps you visualize the needs of the segment and how big of a problem and how much pain they're in that would cause them to look your product the image i have here is actually three friends of mine actually reviewing an actual product and finding out different things about the product themselves because this is pretty apt to show this but this can also point to your mrd can also point to the product concept how it fills the need and how appealing the solution might be the competitive landscape as we saw in the previous slide is also useful as well as a really sound product positioning and strategy as well as a business model so there's a couple of things that i want to dig into here about um for example the business model so you might think that this is kind of early to be looking at a business model typically an mrd is done very early in the process and it usually comes before the prd the product requirements document that has all of the specifications to which you build but my philosophy on this has always been to enter into these thinking as early as possible you know for example you might be thinking that product positioning is just a marketing activity that you would do downstream when you're ready to launch but think about this if you're going to position your product but you've built it to be a very robust platform and yet all of the partners in this space are looking for something light easily integratable maybe inexpensive maybe quick quick for redevelopment easy for the the user to use but you've built a complete robust platform your position is going to be pretty difficult to sell downstream so a lot of the activities that you undertake in an mrd market requirements document have to do with all of these elements of customer that should help you downstream some of them absolutely should be done early the targeting identification of customers and customer segments um and the research which actually can be done pretty easily uh from a secondary source so i do spend a lot of my time pulling together lots of different sources of research for putting together mrds um excuse me you may have heard of a process called lean product process this is another paradigm for driving product development it's somewhat similar to a market requirements document but if you do use the lean model make sure you don't leave out some of the key things like relative positioning and perception of the product um the mrd i feel compared to a lean product process has a wider lens and looks at more more and more variables and the components of the market including sideways competition and in some ways you know i would have considered that pair of jet skis to be sideways competition so anyway i think the overall the overall message here is to use customer research and documentation to really truly uncover all of your opportunities challenge your assumptions and to validate your plans and these are the plans by which you're going to be investing in um it is very expensive and we all know this we've all tried to hire people to join our development team it was very expensive to put together a development team it takes a lot of time and resources really the last thing you want to do is to throw that away what you really want to do is to have the highest possible chance of getting those wins that we originally talked about so i'd like to move on to the next slide and show you a little bit of an example of customer so we of course always want to develop our products for customer but the customer is actually not a person but a group of people and although they have some similarities they also have differences this is why we create market segmentations so in building products um we all understand that we should build a product for our customer but to build a product for completely different segments is taking it a step further and really in a lot of ways it's a way to validate the assumptions that you have about the device or thing that you're building and want to bring to market and how it will appeal and specifically to who so it really kind of forces the issue [Music] this here is a stack of products they were all uh basically a communications bridge from one product to another and it is as you can see from the kind of roughness this is a 3d printed model and because of this uh capability and technology this company was able to build several of them for a number of different segments but you know unlike a 3d printed offering it often does take a lot of resources to build a product for each segment a lot of times you have to prioritize but when you go through this segmentation process and listing out the different needs for each different groups of customers and what the product will look like a lot of times you can get a better idea of where it is your product is most likely to fit and as well where your company's capabilities might be able to shine you know for example um you have a range of let's say you have three variants of a product that you could build you can probably only afford to build one and maybe a second one your company is really good at miniaturization well if you look at all the variants one of those may lend itself to the skills that you have you have in-house and that you can actually go to market with and have a higher chance of winning so um i just wanted to mention because there was a post by valerie recently about power supply and it actually spurred me to make a note to walt and say hey i know of some products that were changed because of the availability of new power so if you look at all the variants of this little product here um advances in power supply as well as new firmware where the driver is for it so let's dive into that a little bit deeper on the next slide so these five variants of the product and i think there were more of them because they have some of the old ones and the original ones and even a third brand um were designed for each segment each of these products was designed for the target customers highest priority and i want to say here that i pulled this off the website for this product and they actually wrote these words in quotes so they really sort of stepped into the shoes of the customer they took their voice so if you want to wear the device on your wristband it's like it's super mini sized pico would be your right choice so you could see the customer standing there in the shoes i would like to keep my device on my watch man so for each of these things the product was optimized for that person's needs and wants um another thing i want to say about this if you can afford to and it's in your development budget or the tools that you're using allow you to build this many variants you would also want to size the segments now this would be true as well if you only can build one of them you want to know of these five segments for this product how many customers are there for each color how many red blue green yellow customers are there and that can help you make that choice but by understanding all of these underlying needs that is really a driver for that so next slide i know this question is coming up because i ask it sometimes how much does all this stuff cost it sounds like a lot of money to find out all this stuff about customers and i will say yes there is an investment up front and it should be a noticeable about a part of the budget but i'll tell you why that cutting back can be risky um it's very expensive to be wrong do you remember of the original slide number two the nine reasons top reasons why startups failure fail lack of product market fit uh it's very costly to scrap and redevelop and relaunch and even worse depending on what your situation and what your market is like your time to market is going to be severely hit and your sales will definitely impact in some industries you may not have another choice for example in medical devices and i know both myself and valeria do a lot of work with medical devices um you often we will not have that shot it takes so long to go through the clinical trials process and to get the testing and the validation done and by the time you do that you're completely out of money just will have no shot so it's true that it does cost a lot uh both up front and then remember we said that we want to do customer validation at each key step before we undertake the next phase of development so through the development process and then of course once you launch there's a whole set of costs that have to do specifically with the launch and starting to sell and generate direct demand so i wanted to talk about the next slide which is um kind of an interesting comparison to make this very real about two companies and what is the cost of one company i shouldn't say one of the companies did not incorporate the customer but one of these two companies did a much better job of incorporating so let's talk about this company a um the two companies are direct competitors they are in a truly breakthrough consumer med tech market actually this was the start of something called continuous glucose monitoring it's an industry that i'm very familiar with a company a has deep pockets they're mighty they have a lot of resources for development and marketing and staffing and on top of it all they actually at this time that this was true which was 2007 they had a more technologically advanced product a company d small scrappy bootstrap now i will say that i think both of these companies they came to market in a similar amount of time and we're on the comparison slide with the company a and d they came to market at around the same time and i do think both of them actually missed the mark as far as the customer it was very interesting they both targeted no surprise the doctors who prescribed their products and what it turns out is that the health consumers and just social networks were taking off the time was actually a much more powerful source of promoting a product and finding out about a product it was also [Music] the product development itself was really slanted really needed to be slanted toward the user which was maybe 15 minutes in a doctor's office every six months but 24 7 the rest of the time in the consumer's own home or environment or where they happen to be so what happened here company d went for broke they made tons of little changes they talked to people they filed we filed tons of supplements to get those changes through and approved by the fda which is required for that to come to market we revised all the user manuals we made sure that a sixth grader could read them we put colors on the instructions for use and big illustrations and just one fold out company a on the other hand dug in in fact they took the opposite effect when the customer said they didn't understand things they added pages to the user manual which ended up being eight and a half by eleven around 132 pages i think was one eighth max um it kept hitting the wrong segments it would not make the updates to the product now granted there were some serious quality issues that had to take place especially when you're dealing with a regulated medical device but in the end um company d embraced what the customers wanted and company a blamed the customers for it so what was the result you could probably guess who won the race company a runs into problems they cannot make changes as the neither its business model nor its approach to customers they were forced to exit the market after just one year and that is with a lot of money a lot of resources um they had the better product to be honest with you i was working for company d at that time so what is the cost of this um not listening to the customer and really not being able to weave in the customer's views and the competition and what was required which really at this time the trend that was missed by both but was adopted much more quickly once it came to market was the convergence a consumer electronics and medical devices and this started around this time so the inability to see that or to foresee that either directly through customer requests or just in the way that they told you this is what i want i don't want a standalone device customers hate stand-alone devices i don't want to carry this separately i want to be able to read it on my phone or i want it to not have to charge with a unique cable these all things that were coming and you could see that so the cost of this was company a had to scrap 100 of its development um efforts and it actually entered the market but our sales target our actual achieved sales was less than five percent of what we were expected to um reach they had to redevelop an entirely new generation product um especially because company d was moving ahead at a rapid pace company d is still on track a little bit uh differently a little bit slower during covert but up to this point around every 18 months or so with a new product version which is actually the same speed as consumer electronics products now i will say company a they did relaunch and they did come back nine years later and they are strong but there was this loss so it's i think the takeaway if you don't have these deep pockets and the ability to withstand nine years of redevelopment um do it right the first time it's really the better way to go it's cheaper um you will see the cost of doing this uh and that's even before we get to the go to market but incorporating all of these processes for customer voice customer experience customer demands into each and every part of your development process is the way to get that speaker off mute and to really hear that so i'm gonna get off my grandstand there and go to uh one of the last slides here which is actually a pretty big slide about getting to market so you you can tell that from the time and everything i've spoken i've focused a lot on the upstream part about the development part about bringing product to market and i think that's partly because we we live in silicon valley and this is the hotbed for being able to do this and frequently what i see is that where companies fail you know they have their approved product or they have their mvp or they've got their their device ready to go out the gate and it's kind of dead in the water because you can't go back i mean sometimes you can change labeling uh you can make the user instructions a little bit better with software the more software you have the more software dependent the product is of course the easier and faster it is to rev that product even though you have less time to market but you can't go back once you have your product and it's done it's done um so this is why i focus so much on the upstream and just sort of in my career i had the opportunity to go downstream i've worked at an advertising agency where we really are generating demand and promoting the product but product is what it is so this is why um i i hope it's obvious i've spent so much time talking about optimization and ensuring really good strong product market fit now that said there's a lot more that comes after that um because two of the big buckets of expenses you'll have during the development process is one of them when you have all those checkpoints for customer validation um but another one of course will come at launch where you have a pretty sizable span just to get the word out to let people know about your product and then there's the actually much greater expense of ongoing demand generation and promotion and branding so i'm not going to talk about the branding part today um that's definitely downstream and if you've got the right product you will find an agency to help you there's plenty of them out there but i wanted to talk a little bit about some of the go to market planning that you can do even before you do hit the market if the longer you wait the more risk you could take on these go-to-market assumptions ideally would all be present in your mrd the first thing we talked about which is really your playbook and your plan for how the product uh will be how the product will exist and live and market through its life um you may in fact if you've done a good job on the mrd and you've even looked for example early distribution channels which i think why would i do that before i even have barely started development think about this your distribution channel considerations may actually cause a need for you to modify your product um we talked about the the fat um platform versus the skinny platform i actually know of a company that they had their product was on market they actually had to scrap it for um supply issues they had to redesign the whole thing they had a 53-week lead time um and they had to redesign the whole thing but you know and so obviously it's another year of development there but if we had looked at uh we understand supply chain issues now with covid but if we had looked at all the considerations that we will actually take to manufacture and then distribute and then promote and partner with other companies to be able to really sell your product it would make a lot of sense that you would want to at least have these in mind before you come to market a really good live example uh is back to consumer medical devices which really are consumer devices used in a purely medical context in fact many of them are fda approved and coming to market um downstream used to mean that of course you had to figure out who was going to pay for your product right reimbursement which insurance companies and how to get that but within the consumer world in convergence here there are a lot more new channels that are available particularly in the field of digital health and lots of different partnerships that you might never have thought about before i mean we've all sort of heard about them in the last year or two the partnerships walgreens cvs amazon for medical products but if you went backwards two years and looked at the start of your development and you saw the convergence of these channels um there might actually have been a different consideration that you may have made in your product specifications in order to account for that capability that would give you an advantage when you do come so um even to the point of thinking downstream when you're looking at go to market to what degree will your product be integrated with another product or used as a companion you know i mentioned that consumers and we all know this we all hate standalone products yes i want the functionality of your product but no i do not want to carry another device so if you are developing a product um to what degree does it need to be able to optimize the integration and are you building that in in time to really take advantage of that in the market so there are some specialized considerations where you were really forced to think about your go to market activities at the very start of development and this is particularly true in medical devices so in medical devices there is a thing called an indication and it's a statement that you file with the fda my device is for blue ink to be used on writing on rough surfaces like paper and cardboard it can be used by humans aged 15 and up etc etc once you are approved by the fda for this that is the only thing that you can say about your product you cannot change those words at all they'll throw you in jail if you do so when you think about this if you're going to just sort of think well i think i know what people want and build product and even get an fda clearance for it and then fast forward to the day that you're ready to launch this thing you're like wait a minute i need to be selling against this or i'm just picking up things or this or whatever it has but you can't do that because your indication for use and really the way your customer is going to use your product is locked in and that's another one of those um [Music] one of those unfortunate moments so these are some of the reasons why you would think about go to market planning even before you get to an mvp or even invested any sizeable sum of money or any amount of resources so if we do have presumably now that we've all going to be discussing this um strong product market fit and when we're ready to launch we will have at least some pent-up demand we assume that we know who's going to buy it because we've done our customer segmentation and we know what our competitors are going to do and how we're going to compete against them today and even in the next six months or a year but now we also need to know well how are people going to buy this so part of the go to market um uh needs that you'll need to figure out is how to generate demand and how to select partners to get to market it's pretty rare uh kind of like standalone devices other than big tech are rare it's rare that a sole product um as successful and by the same token it's rare that a company gets to market on its own without distribution or sales partners so um i'm sorry i just lost my train of thought here but i wanted to say that these are all things that you think about in your go to market plan so you can start this early in your mrd and keep updating it as the market moves and you see activity and as you see uh opportunities one of the things that you should think about early and i really want to emphasize this because i come across a ton of products where people ask me to help them but they haven't thought about this so they think they know who the customer is and just when i say think this is what kicks in next because if you're not sure and you don't know who is going to pay for your product this is really common believe it or not in medical devices medical devices as you know um kind of like the health system there is a long chain from the service to the actual patient the end user and it's quite convoluted in between they've got insurance companies and durable medical equipment distributors and hospital accountability groups all through it's not always clear who is going to pay so i always tell people to envision who is signing your invoice and you need to make sure that your product is positioned that way so even though it's a medical product for example that might be uh to help with an eye the the key decision maker in that sales process might be the finance department of the hospital so you need to be able to message to these people and you need to understand this because that can have an impact on your product development as well as your overall marketing plans so i think the the last part i want to mention is messaging and branding position so of course this is something that is often done at the end we'll develop a logo a color scheme a position statement that will incorporate our unique value proposition um but it is sometimes helpful to get this in early in the light platform heavy platform um the medical devices where you really do need to understand where your position in and even you know for example when markets converge um if you were not sort of aware of this trend or you were aware but you didn't incorporate into your product it might not be um in the messaging of um how you are presenting your product to your customers in all the different ways um and you know all those viral social media as well as traditional means uh influencer groups are all valid but in the end you will have a message that you have to deliver to them to do demand and lead generation and create a funnel for your sales so i think it's not a good idea to set up a media and a sales plan really early on but it is good to have this in mind and to the degree that it will affect you so i do think the specifics of getting to market and how early and how much you invest early or not and the specific tactics and techniques will vary with the product in the industry and you know having worked across a lot of industries i've seen a lot of different changes but what this all means is that there's a lot of potential out there i will say um i always when i work with a client i always hope really crossing my fingers that my competition is listening to a talk like mine and just blowing it off and i'm like yes that'll give me a little advantage but in within that um you've also seen some of the things that you can do to really kick-start your chances of getting to market and being successful and winning and fulfilling the dreams that you've had so this is why i have my last slide as the bright future for all of you and i hope that that is helpful and insightful to what you're going to be doing today or over the next weeks months or years so thank you very much um i had my chat on i don't see anything in there but i'm going to uh turn this over to brian and he's going to basically moderate any questions or comments you have i'd actually love to hear any experiences even challenges you have to any of the information that i've presented [Music] hello guys thank you jessica ching again for your presentation uh this is very insightful and and exciting as well we did get a couple of questions on the chat uh let's see here so we have a question here from dev uh he says thank you for the excellent presentation thank you deb uh also so his question is can some company in the very initial initial stage with low money budget and a printed part for pico form factor with connectivity to a software model running on a pc can use to get feedback from customers and use the customer feedback help to create engineering model that will be successful yes yes i do believe that there is um marketing for every budget um including startups when there is not a lot of money around so i know it is very common for startups to ask the people kind of in their inner circle um to test products or give their opinion and i think i mean i think that's a that's the right concept but one way to do it inexpensively is just to go maybe outside of your immediate circle you know i always use my mom as the example or members of people in my family or even in my circle for example who in my own tech circle still friends of mine but who are not tech savvy who may struggle a little bit more and to get their opinion that's the first thing the second thing i would suggest for you dev is to try and formalize and quantify these opinions so if you can create a survey or a form where you can see side by side everybody's opinions and you can more easily start to see trends and the third thing i would say is that and i have been i will agree that i am guilty of this as well is have someone else look at your data um because you it's a human nature i think to see what we want to see and even though the survey results you know of course they're probably cluster around something that's obvious and there's a few outliers but i will say that don't discard those outliers and have someone look at that that has maybe a different view from yours or even a different department for example someone on your team who's who's uh in finance or hr that's more of their strength than it is in technical or engineering or development to look at that and what do they think about that um so these are some of the tools that you can use without spending necessarily a ton of money i think there are some other layers for example you can often reach out to people with surveys um that are outside your network and for a small amount of money five dollars maybe per person you can get some input um those are reasonable ways until you can really spend money to do a more uh scientifically unbiased and maybe even a larger sample but i think that's a good start okay great yeah no that's a very good answer uh and then uh we also have uh a question from ann gabith hughes she mentioned it's really informative but how does one know what you should integrate your medical device to for example the continuous glucose monitoring device what else can it be integrated to so um the short answer to this is that all cgms will operate from a phone in i'll call this this is jessica's prediction in 24 months if your product does not work on someone's phone it's dead i see yeah that's a good but how do you know what to integrate to i think was the root of your question um and i'll go back to my example of 2007 when company a and company d were really looking at their product right this was their segment and it was a very actually it's a pretty well defined segment it's for a specific type of type 1 diabetes and blood sugar monitoring um but we were looking at the traditional way of bringing things to market which is to kind of buddy up and make friends with the doctors and get them to prescribe and then distribute and pay through the traditional um insurers but i think today um [Music] we have the ability to see trends coming from different places and i would say that i think although it wasn't necessarily very high on our consciousness level like it is today but the convergence of consumer devices and medical devices is pretty darn obvious and it was starting back then and if you read the tea leaves so to speak i mean if you went out there and talked to people it was already starting so it is a combination of sometimes more of that scientific research and other times it is following up on your intuition where you know i'm seeing a lot of this is interesting i just did three or four hours of internet research yesterday on published papers on a certain item of what my client wanted me to look at i couldn't find anything and i kept finding this other stuff and this other stuff like why are you guys talking about this why are you talking about this i want to know about a and you're talking about d does that sound familiar yeah yes so i have to write back to the client i'm like well you know we don't really have this ability to find information that doesn't exist but i will tell you where the trend is going yeah this is from you know research publication it takes two years to publish a paper so it's out there so to answer your question and um you got to look around and sometimes you have to look far from where you think your market is so don't take your eyes off that awesome yes no yeah it's part of the foreseeing and being able to forecast but you just never know you gotta follow the trend uh if do we have room for another question uh any other questions yeah there's another one yeah yeah throw them at me i'm curious okay all right so we have one from joanne uh she says can there be too much too much customer feedback yeah just like there can be analysis paralysis i do believe there can be thank you thank you um because you you know it's easy to do this i've worked in consumer electronics we build what the customer says they want and then we launch it and they don't want it right so you know this is part art and it is part science um there's a science part and you have control over that the art part interestingly enough is something that people struggle with sometimes because you do you're you are you're using intuition and you're taking like you're taking a risk in some ways right um yes you're extrapolating what you think where the trend is going to go and how fast but this is all part of um the secret of product development so i think that one of the ways that you increase your chances of landing on the right spot is to broaden your view so if your team has mostly um you're lucky if you have a bunch of engineers and technical people because they're hard to get but it is often helpful to balance sometimes with other people even for example like an operational person um a pure supply chain person a finance person and you know sometimes we say those people we peg them into their little round the round hole right that this is what they do but i really do believe there is value um in sometimes other people's opinions because i have seen so many times when there's some little data point like out in the stratosphere and i'm like yeah yeah that's an outlier guess what yeah i've got a question for you yes okay yeah how do you go about asking your customers in early stages when you're developing your mrd how do you ask them about their needs you know everybody's heard about henry ford saying well my customers just wanted faster horses so how do you come up with a car when customers are saying they want faster horses okay so this is a great one and i love your question by the way um first of all there are some leap frogs that it's very difficult to anticipate um i think the car or the horse to the car was one of them and perhaps even the move from blackberry and um uh forgetting what is jeff hawkins um his devices blackberries and uh palms palm pilots thank you that was my favorite thing um to the multimedia machine of the iphone that was something that was not easy to call but a lot of times here's how i do this when i'm looking for the trend and i don't see one necessarily from research start interviewing people and talk to them ask them about their life so you're trying to solve a problem in a specific area right and probably you've got a certain type of product in mind so tell me about your life what is your life like are you happy how much time does it take you what's the rest of your life like uh who else is in your life so you start to build this sort of pixelated sketch and you're putting in one pixel at a time sort of like uh i guess like jeopardy right you got one letter at a time and you're like oh and you know sometimes until the person calls it out you don't see it but sometimes you do so that is one of the tools that i use is really just an understanding of lifestyle and i do think actually for products that is a very useful way to anticipate something that the customer themself can't directly tell you and they don't necessarily know they want or they need but they do know they have these pains and these other things make them happy and they have these constraints and these abilities etc cetera so you see where i'm going with this so that can be um a broad way to get into a space that your competitor's probably not doing again i always pray for my competitors to blow me off that's probably that could happen because then i can help my clients win right yep excellent thank you very much um um very good i'm glad everybody got a chance to do some networking so uh let me know if we're okay has everybody everybody had a chance to grab the emails they wanted to grab if i close now will he be okay thank you guys again uh you'll be able to see my email uh for future reference and also the meetup link uh where you guys can sign up and uh be aware of the upcoming events that we have um and again if you guys have questions feel feel free to let me know uh feel free to let walt know and uh and then we'll go from there thank you guys for joining again thank you very much how long

2022-04-08 20:00

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