Speaker 2 (00:05.614)
Welcome to the Hard Tech Podcast.

Welcome back to the Hard Tech podcast. I'm your host, Deandre Hericus, my usual suspect, Grant Chapman. And we've got a really fun guest today, Basher Tome from a company, if you're in the world of Hard Tech, if you love coffee, he's from Fellow. He's the senior manager in product design at Fellow. Welcome to the show.

How's it going, everybody?

Speaker 1 (00:27.246)
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, I know we were super excited to have the conversation as we were looking for different folks to have on the podcast. think that Grant said if we get fellow on the entire team, including Grant and the rest of engineering team here, we're really, really excited about it. So excited to have you on.

We might be violent coffee nerds in the office. think that's a good way to put it. Coffee of all kinds. Cold coffee, hot coffee, coffee of creative ways, coffee of normal ways. We're big fans.

And for the folks that are just less familiar.

By the way, I could have told you there's lower key ways to get a friends and family discount code, but I appreciate inviting you on the podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:04.053)
Yeah, this is all just our point to get some nice coffee makers and things like that. That's right. Well, thanks everybody. This is the hard take. I'm just kidding. No, but for the folks that are a little bit less familiar, Basher, would love to get a background on yourself and also just fellow at large for the folks that are less familiar.

Yeah, we're trying to upgrade the office setup again.

Speaker 1 (01:22.35)
Sure, yeah, I am I went to school for industrial design and I've always been in the world of design I started off really thinking as a lot more on the analog and hardware side. I found the Wikipedia entry for user experience design and then

thought that seemed cool so I changed my title on my website to that and sort of started my professional career going that way. But I never sort of lost the love for the hardware side of things and especially looking at how talented people were at screen-based design and how okay a lot of the hardware stuff was, it felt like there was a lot more room to be unique and like help.

in that sort of space in between. So I really tried to push towards that in my career and it's been fun trying to play that hybrid role. I think part of rejecting sort of a traditional title in that sense put a lot of onus on me to go and explain to people like what do I want to do and what do I want to figure out and it's been healthy to some degree and sort of making me then think about that critically and go through it. Yeah, think about it sort of critically and be in

about my career choices, but I've been really lucky, I think in combination with that. So it's been really fun working on a variety of stuff, almost exclusively on the hardware side.

Now that's...

Speaker 2 (02:39.81)
That's awesome. Purdue University here in Indiana has a UX degree, user experience degree, like on its own outside of the design school. And there's industrial designers and UX designers. And what are really fascinating to me are when you get one of either camp that goes to the other side professionally, right? You get the people that study UX that actually end up in industrial design professionally later in life through their career choices and stuff. And you get the people that are industrial design that end up in user experience, whether it's digital or physical user experience, or my favorite one,

user experience. don't know if you got to study that when you were at school. There's a huge like subset of UX at Purdue that is all about place like museums, airports, the blend of architecture and user experience which is a really wide. Right well that would be the design of the building just like industrial design is the design of the good.

think at other schools they call that architecture.

And then there's the user experience side of how that works and it's such a cool degree that is like each like you can like carve a face off of either one of the degrees to fit the other one in either digital, physical or place from either degree. I think there's like this the faceting of these degrees and how they get shown up in professions get to be wild.

like you know what I work on, what I'm specialized in. I've met some really cool people along that path that just like you studied one and ended up practicing the other part way and creating their own path in a degree, in a professional program outside of their degree. So how do you describe what you get to do to someone who doesn't know what it is?

Speaker 1 (04:10.798)
I mostly boil it down to I design coffee equipment. I think when I'm talking to someone who's closer to the industry and maybe wants a little bit more specifics, I think especially in the more individual contributor portion of it, like the critical parts of the design that I love to do, I started calling it hardware interface design. Secretly, I...

I wrote a Wikipedia entry for it in school and my whole goal was to incept it into existence by the time I was applying for a job. It didn't totally work out, but I feel like at the edit history it's basically me and anonymous me.

It's less that I was trying to invent a new thing, and it was more that I was hoping to find other people who say, yes, that's what I do, and we call it XYZ. And so if someone at some point told me, no, this has a normal name, here it is, like, that would have been great. I call it a day and I apply to those jobs, but hasn't happened yet. So yeah, hardware interface design is sort of what I go with for now. And I think it's a nice way to try and describe.

the interface elements on physical products. And think you see some people call it physical UX. Some people call it hardware UX. It's all kind of in that same boat. I think now that I've been working at Fella for a couple of years, I definitely expanded my set beyond what I can do as an individual. So I am doing a little bit more on industrial design, on packaging, on...

product management and a couple other things, but yeah, I think for like my career as a designer I was pretty narrow in that sort hardware interface design track.

Speaker 2 (05:48.494)
And hardware interface to you means like how a human would approach an interface with that good, right? Like for example, if I had a handle on this glass, that would be part of the hardware interface, like how I'm acting in the interface with the hardware. For a coffee machine, what have been like the interesting or I'll call it non-obvious parts of hardware interface that took a lot of thought or effort to get to feel perfect or right?

Hmm. Yeah. I mean, the handle is probably like if I'm building kingdoms, that's probably like the one where we're really pushing the limits of what this is called. I'm like, yeah, that's hardware UX, which it is, right? Like it's almost a classical, like, you know, like in Don Norman's book, like that's his canonical example of UX. like in terms of like as a trade and like, like directly when I'm working with other people, especially if there's other industrial designers on the project, then I shy away a little bit of like when it's purely.

ergonomic and there are people who are even better at that than I am, especially if I'm working with them on that same project. I think for like the coffee maker, for example, the stuff where it gets really gnarly and it doesn't necessarily fit cleanly in industrial design is things like the way our machine can switch from single serve to batch brew. I'm not trying to sell you one, but just like it's a complicated problem.

That's interesting because we wanted to maintain really high quality, whether you're doing a small amount of coffee or large. And fundamentally, you need to distribute the coffee or sorry, the water from the showerhead differently because we actually have different baskets. Because we realized like the way the coffee extracts is super different and you want the bed set up differently. And so even just boiling it down to like, okay, like how are we going to do this? Right? Is this fully mechanical and automated? Are we going to do one monolithic thing? Or if you are switching things, what's the right amount of

things to make a customer have to fiddle with when going from one thing to another. And then what's an adequate amount of fidelity that we're making them do, right? You could make it a fully analog thing where they're like deling in the bore on each of the holes. There's a lot of crazy stuff you could do. And where we ended up with is there's two things you have to change. You swap out the baskets, and then you swap, you turn the dial on the shower head between one position and another.

Speaker 2 (07:39.362)
Right.

Speaker 2 (08:06.51)
But even

And then as like, yeah, it's like a valve. It's reverse threaded. at least like you turn it to the left, even though it's closing it, it's like less coffee and then more coffee. even that was like a little bit of like non-intuitive, like from like the mechanical engineer we fought because he like, that's not. I've of righty tighty. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, yes, I've heard of righty tighty, but.

That's not how knob work.

Speaker 2 (08:31.598)
But if you want coffee, I want to go to

More coffee, less coffee. Yeah. So I think for the most part, no one's ever been confused about it. So I felt like we make the right choice there. But yeah, there's a of like little UX moments in that and making those decisions. But even then, having to change the shower head position and change the basket is not obvious, especially if you've used a coffee maker before. So even then there was debates on like, OK, how instrumented do we want this? And so on the shower head, we instrumented it with one magnet off.

And so because you can turn it from one to the other, you can also fully remove the shower head. And we don't distinguish between no shower head in one of the positions. But like you do that very rarely for cleaning. on the basket, you have to actually swap it out. So we put two magnets because we needed to know like, is there no basket? Cause that's way worse to go into. so even, to me, a lot of that is this sort of balance of both it's like UX, there's industrial design, there's engineering.

like okay like how much money are we gonna spend on that like what's too much fussiness for the customer what's too much tech

What gets too unreliable from a sensor perspective like over time like man I hate my thing because the smart sensor always breaks. I have to bypass it

Speaker 3 (09:45.036)
And so is that really the key when you created award-winning products or been a part of teams that have absolutely done that at Fellow? Is that sort of the decision-making criteria and that sort of complexity of decisions on the form and the factor, is that basically what plays into making something great like you've already done? good to Good to great, right, yeah.

good to great.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, for us especially, because we really try and differentiate our brand, not just on the aesthetic, but also in the functionality. And then oftentimes on the ease of use. the ease of use and the functionality both, a lot of times, tend to complicate the product in certain ways. How so? Like, to have higher quality coffee, oftentimes you have to complicate the actual makeup of the device.

Like how you'll water to the coffee. might have to control the rate.

We use a really fancy heater which has its own whole new like off-road stuff we had to do to figure out how to get that to happen where it's like a flow through heater but it's not really a normal flow through.

Speaker 2 (10:46.254)
because it's got better temperature control with a tighter temperature range. Yep.

Yeah, exactly. But also, it's a part that some of our competitors use in millions of machines that are for espresso makers. So it's experimental for the application rather than experimental for the world. And that was also kind an intentional thing, where we weren't really at a point where we had so much R &D time and space to really invent a heater.

But we saw this little break in the clouds where there's this through line where like, why has no one used this somewhat newer but also somewhat commodity part in a new way? But even then, giving then that temperature control to people, how do we give people that power while then also not making the complexity of the user really high too? And so a lot of it is balancing like, OK, does this make the product more complicated to make? And does it make it more complicated to use?

Sometimes the more pro-y thing is less complicated to use because you can just make it more like... You reduce the guardrails. You don't need to add all the sensors. You don't need to all of these things. If...

If the user is an expert.

Speaker 1 (12:02.638)
Yeah, yeah, if the user's either an expert or they have this as the most important thing in their life, where they're going to really care. But for a lot of people who buy our product, it isn't the most important thing in their life. They're paying us to make this easy. Good.

for a little

Speaker 2 (12:18.114)
to make great coffee. Right. And I think that's what this is the important part of like this fun place you play in, which I think this is very similar to the cycling space where coffee is a thing that everyone, many people consume. Many people own bicycles. Right. Most people own a Walmart bike that is just a bike to get them on around on nice days. Right. Go to the park and back. Some people own a bike to get to work and some people are the

weekend warrior that are going to spend lots of money on the lightest and the stiffest and strongest bike. And it's also fashion. Coffee is also this place and space. Many people consume and make coffee at home or consume it in a bottom store. Many people just want a reliable coffee machine that doesn't break. Some people would pay more money for a reliable coffee machine that makes great coffee. And then there's a whole subset of the market that wants the most control and kind of like the nerdiest aspect of getting into their craft. And I think that's what's cool about coffee and cycling is like

They're one of the few markets that has what I call that whole spectra from the user that wants the cheapest thing because they just need it as a function to the normal person that's willing to pay for quality to the crazy person that wants all the control and the highest quality that money can buy.

Yeah. Yeah. mean, like, yeah, in terms of complexity, too, there's such a huge range in terms of how you make coffee, right? Like Turkish coffee is the most metal way to drink coffee. Yeah. Like you take the coffee, you grind it up, you put it into a cup. And you eat the coffee, like you drink, you eat the whole thing. There's no filtering, like there's no there's no mess. Like it's just you eat the whole thing. In that way, matcha is also the most metal way to have tea. Right. You eat the whole thing.

And you had hot water.

Speaker 2 (13:44.268)
Right, like the...

Speaker 2 (13:54.958)
that's awesome.

And then like French press is kind of like one step above that. We're like, well, maybe we shouldn't eat the whole coffee. We'll filter it a little bit, but either way, it's like basically in a big glass cup, you mix it around and then you pour it out.

Yep, and you are mechanically to get rid of those grinds, which is admittedly Miley's favorite part about French press. I love the coffee, actually. I really like the way French press tastes on cold days. I want a hot French press. Like, that's delicious. I hate cleaning my French press. It is like the thing that gets me to not do it.

Yeah, I agree. For me, filter coffee, whether it's through a drip machine or pour over, to me is one of the most balanced ways of fussiness to fussiness, guess, like fussiness in coffee versus fussiness in practice, where it's really easy to get rid of. You just take the whole thing and you put it in the compost bin. It's paper. So there's some consumable element to it, but so is the coffee.

And they're both plant-based if you're doing it right.

Speaker 1 (14:44.96)
Yeah, yeah.

Another question I have, Basher, when you're creating a new product, you obviously have a ton of different stakeholders involved from the business case, the marketing case, the actual product development, the engineers that are a part of it. What are some success stories that you found, successfully navigating those key stakeholders to launch these products, and what are some things like that you've experienced?

That's a good question. think, let's see, I mean, honestly, not to keep going to Aiden, but...

For us, one of the bigger success, I mean, for me personally, one of the bigger success stories is in pushing for single serve and batch brew to coexist in the machine. I think when we first were concepting it, we were thinking, okay, let's make a really great, highly controllable batch brew machine. But then like talking to people, looking at some of the user journeys, like a lot of folks are making one cup for themselves, but feel ridiculous buying a machine. Just that.

Just for that.

Speaker 1 (15:47.084)
Yeah, and vice versa would have a hard time buying a batch machine if they're going to make more coffee than they need to drink.

Every day, right, as part of everyday, like, ritual kind of thing.

Yeah, and then we were also seeing, like, the same person.

is different on different days, which makes sense because they're human. But like you might have people over on the weekend or you might drink coffee with other people who live in your house on the weekend. But maybe on a weekday, you may have slightly different schedules. You're busy. You're making just the cup for yourself. And so I think that really inspired us to try and make a single product that can do both, even though it added complexity, it added cost. It added a ton of like, and complexity to us, but also complexity to the user. Like it came with significant

that we thought through and really considered dearly because we could have made a far simpler product had we chosen not to do that.

Speaker 3 (16:41.71)
I think there's so much worth it. Yeah, I think there's much value in like you just said, in like working through those, that conversation to come out to the other side and say, hey, we're going to do this, even though this seems a little bit counterintuitive. Can you kind of walk us through that as much as you can in terms of, you know, how do you kind of get, guide people along the way to like land on this as opposed to either going left or right or, you know, the individual self-server or the batch brew?

My question is, who are the stakeholders you're talking to? Both internally, I'm sure there's engineering and manufacturing and the rest of the design team. And then who are you talking to externally? And for a company the size of Fellow, how many users do you actually talk to or survey to make these choices?

Yeah, I was, as a caveat, was inspired for all of this to be better. I will at least start with what we have done and maybe we can eventually transition to what I wish we could do.

OK. I love that. Yeah, let's do that.

But yeah, what we did for this is we reached out to a bunch of our customers who live in the San Francisco Bay Area, because that's where our headquarters are. We got a couple dozen people to try out prototypes. We had some surveys sent out. We also have a whole email database that we reach out to. Four people are fanatical, especially about our product. We have a whole customer base that we can pull through. We even like.

Speaker 2 (18:01.302)
in a beta program you can email and ask questions please take the survey which one of these things would you use more often etc

Yeah, yeah, we even like reached out on Instagram and got some feedback that way. We also have a lot of non-normal people cut, like we have, what's the best way to put it? I'll not categorize it, like we have like.

Our customers are both like normal people who go and buy it at Amazon, but also our distributors. They're roasters, they're resellers, they're like retailers. we have a big variety. And so we go and we, we pitch concepts to, them as partners. Like they see a lot more than us. see, they have their own customers that they understand that they research. So we are working with like, like William Sonoma and Creighton Burrell. We talked to a good amount. we also talked to some of our more like local distributors. Cause we also, like we, we sell at smaller coffee shops. so especially when

trying to understand like coffee coffee we have a lot of really great relationships there with like roasters, nerds, those retailers but then yeah we do try and reach out to especially for something like Aiden that's a little bit more mass market we do try and get some of these more broader opinions on like okay you're not really into coffee

But you sell coffee products in and around your retail store What would make you buy this or do you have any customer data to help influence these choices? It's like my yeah Would you categorize these people's like buyers like the buyers for Williams-Sonoma the buyers for targeted pick would go on the shelf or who? Who are the titles of these kind of people?

Speaker 1 (19:27.224)
Yeah, buyers is the right word I was looking for before. Yes, we would call them buyers. Yeah.

Now that's awesome. So you're looking through not just the boots on the ground consumer market, like these are the consumers, our ICP. You have to go up market into here are the people that help get my product to my ICP. Here's who they serve. And that's super fascinating for like us to talk about because in our world in hardware and product development, we are often what does the end user want and less in the business case. And you guys had to take in consideration what is the business case for fellow.

and our partners that help get our product out in the market, which I think is such a cool blend of design and go-to-market strategy of like that we, this is why podcasts exist, like uncover these like untalked about gems of who you actually have to talk to, not just my core user.

Yeah, yeah, and we do a mix of like, yeah, sure, like there's market research, right? And like, should we even make a coffee maker? Sure. And then once we're like sized at all and we're pretty feeling pretty good about the business and like, sure, right, like individual product decisions do affect the performance of the product. So it's totally hard to annex like to separate all that out. But we do then also go back to some of these folks because we have some of these relationships where we can say, hey, like, here's the latest update on the work in progress AIDA and.

Are you excited about this? How do you guys feel about it? It's all input. It's not really like we're necessarily asking for permission, especially if they're excited about the product, like when it comes to the buyers. But we do take their feedback really seriously. And there's a lot of times where they've come up with either a couple features or they've had feedback about some stuff seeming too complex, where we take it to real heart and we try and change it before we make them buy it from us.

Speaker 2 (21:09.322)
I think that's such a cool side of the narrative that I could have never had on my bingo card when Deanna and I were like, I'm going to go ask this question, like, who do you talk to when you develop a coffee machine? Like, how do get enough feedback that wasn't on my bingo card? That's so neat. And then, of course, I'm sure your internal engineering team yells at the design team all the time for why are you making me do all this hard stuff? Because we do that here at Class Report all the time. The ID team and the electrical and ME team will, know, Spider-Man pointed at each other. It's all your fault this is hard today. And we've to go work together to go figure out a way to get out of it, make the

clients happy.

I even think it's a great point to even for like startups, you know, folks that are making a net new product and, know, not just looking at your initial beach at ICP and also thinking a little bit ahead of time and saying, okay, well, eventually this product could maybe be on the shelves of a Walmart or a Best Buy or something that actually reaching out to buyers saying, hey, look, this store building, you know, getting on the radar early, obviously, you're probably not at the scale where they're actually take you seriously, but maybe they're willing to give you some advice and some feedback that you can actually implement, like you mentioned directly into the product. I think that's fantastic. The other question I

have is so you mentioned that that's he did that's he did the initial way he also said like this is what you maybe would have done a little bit different I'm excited to dive into that a little bit more

Yeah, sure. I mean, I think with the buyers, I'm really, I'm mostly happy with our ability to reach out. Cause we have these existing relationships. Obviously we're not cold emailing Costco and saying, I think we work with them, but let's pretend we don't work with them. We're not cold emailing them and saying, Hey, I have some ideas for a coffee. We don't do that. It's more of the like, they're coming by for a review or maybe we're in a review call already for our existing lineup. We're talking about new product development and then we get some of their thoughts.

Speaker 1 (22:49.04)
So I think we have some of that trust built up in like having worked with them for many years, some of them 10 years. And so I think like it's nice and I feel lucky to be able to draft off of that.

What I want to do more on the other end is then with customers and doing more upfront research there. So I think we try really hard to do internal research. And we do have these 20, 30 person pools of beta testers and things like that. What I'd love to do is even earlier than beta tests is we're prototyping and building out concepts and testing those on like.

real people who don't work at the company. mean, like, we have like a good variety of folks at the company, so like, we're still able to just like seed a little bit of a fresh pool, but just to hit like bigger numbers and get really fresher takes and then be able to have a better alignment of our target demographics. Yeah.

earlier in the design cycle is what you're looking for.

So yeah, we're like really even just high level like are these features good and not having to fully lean on the buyers and then we can really like show even detailed designs and like walk them through. Yeah. And I'd like to that more than what we do today.

Speaker 2 (24:00.398)
And so double clicking into that, we think about that in Glass Word all the time. How can I get out of the four walls of our business and go ask people about this new, I'm going to use the fictitious IoT toaster that I always use with all my fake ideas. So we need to go figure out what features of an internet connected toaster would users like and like, is it a focus group? Is it a survey with different renders showing different features and you know, conceptually in two dimensions? Is it a 3D animation they react to or is it AR where like they're

able to quickly manipulate the UX on the toast where we have buttons instead of the push down lever, it's all a touch screen. What methods could you think of or have you thought of that you'd like to implement? Is it just phone calls and Google meets and Zoom calls? What level of fidelity do you think would be the most useful that you aren't currently doing?

Hmm. Yeah. mean, I think, yeah, models I think would be great. I think a little bit of like interactive stuff. think like physical interaction stuff would be really great to like test on people because sometimes it's really hard, especially like unless you're going through like a company and it's super blind, like a lot of times, right? Like you walk up, if people aren't jerks, you walk up to them and you're essentially saying, you like my project?

Do you

Which is the worst way to get customer feedback is to jump on a call. Yeah, they're like, no, it's so beautiful. And then you're like, OK, give me money for the baby. Maybe the product. And they're like, Then you're in a bad spot,

Speaker 1 (25:20.75)
It's maybe ugly.

Speaker 1 (25:29.248)
Yeah, yeah. I think like over Zoom sometimes can be tough for some of those things because then you're really asking for their analysis. Whereas, I mean, like software stuff, maybe different story, right? Like you can have them actually run through stuff, screen record and see how they do. But I think I've learned the most.

from when I give someone like a prototype, you're even a paper mock-up or whatever, and I look at how they're doing and I'm judging their performance. I'm also getting their opinion about how they think they're doing and how they feel about it, because that's also important. But you kind of need both and it's hard to just take their own assessment at face value, even when they are trying their best, but they can only be the best they can be.

It's kind of like that behavioral analysis. I had a conversation with a gentleman who created the Delta Touch faucet, for example. And he said they brought in a bunch of folks. They literally scheduled and they went into people's like on Thanksgiving and then watched how the moms were putting together the Thanksgiving dinner. And what was super fascinating was that they noticed that the moms would walk in carrying these big turkeys and would lean over to touch to grab the top of the faucet to turn it on. they were like, what if we could just tap with your elbow?

or hover over it, right? And so that's kind of the birth of what was one of their more successful products too. So I'm curious as well, Basher, what sort of cool, or maybe you don't know, maybe that's whole point you're doing it, in terms of things that you think will come of that, like doing the very early research and kind of getting some of these initial product iterations in front of folks to touch and feel and experiment. What sort of things do you think that will come up that would maybe be unexpected, that you would have otherwise gotten more consistent results from the internal team?

Hmm. I mean, one of the most, I think focus groups get a really bad rep. I think mostly because of Steve Jobs, but.

Speaker 2 (27:28.546)
that in movies and video never show them kindly.

Yeah, I think like any tool, it can be used poorly. I have had professionally only one, I've only ever done a focus group once and it was fantastic.

And I did not run it. It was not my idea, but I work with this product marketing manager Anissa on the pixel buds the technically version 2 Her the product name her team came up with for the version 2 of pixel buds was to call them the pixel buds So it'd be hard to Google this but there was a there was

There was a version before the, yeah. So I worked on the ones that had no cable and we had one that had the cable and that was like, came out around the same time as AirPods a little after. And one of the things she did that I thought was so brilliant is when, when they did the focus group, did two things. One is they gave everyone homework and they actually made them use both products for a week each leading up to the focus group. So not going into the focus group cold. They're actually doing a bunch of stuff, coming in with opinions they're building.

and then arriving having used both AirPods and our first generation Pixel Buds and then there and then they're talking about it together as a group. So it seemed like there was a lot less people just piling on to other people's opinions because they all came in with opinions of their own and they were able to pull from their experiences over the past two weeks to speak to them. And they were much more informed than just like their hot takes like

Speaker 2 (28:44.983)
is made.

Speaker 3 (28:59.13)
And you're also kind of avoiding the group bias as well, right? If you're net new, you're in a room for a group of individuals you don't know, one person says, I don't like this. I agree with that, because I don't want to sound silly or what have you. I might have a different opinion. But if they're already coming with their preconceived notions, they're fundamentally walking into that space wanting to back up their preconceived. So they're already anchored in what they believe. so if anything, they're just going go find people that agree with what they're agreeing with, which is fine. That's the real feedback, which I agree.

What's amazing is so many of them were then able to back up their disagreement not just with I didn't like it, but I didn't like it, comma, and then insert anecdote and story, which was amazing.

the battery died at the end of my day an hour before i was stated every single day

Yeah, yeah, like I had a hard time pairing it or like whatever it was and they tried to balance it where like half of them were Android users, half of them were iOS. They made both of them use both. The other thing that I thought was so smart and maybe this isn't that unique, but I really love what they did, which is at the end of the whole thing. We got all the feedback. It was great. Also, they had no idea because it because we gave them both AirPods in Google. They had no idea it was like Google hiring them. Yeah, yeah, although.

It might have been Apple hiring.

Speaker 3 (30:04.523)
Very cool.

depending on how much they've read about Steve Jobs, I think they probably could. But anyway, it could have been neither who hired them. anyway, we tried to make, so they didn't directly know that Google was running this study. But the thing they did at the end of study, which I loved, which was the end, they said, okay, we're gonna go around the room and congratulations, I have really great news for you. You can take one of these home forever. But you have to pick. Because it's really hard to say like,

but you have to pick.

Speaker 1 (30:38.058)
How do you simulate buying, right? Yeah. Like without just making people buy it. But yeah, they made them go around the room like, and like as they're walking out, they're like, okay, like which one do you want to keep? Well, you know, and they made everyone make their choice, say why. And then they did another double, is like, just kidding. You can have both. It's fine.

Yeah, like we can't give them to anyone. You already warned them. They're yours. we needed to make you like truly pick with dollars with perceived value. Which one? Like I like that. I might have to steal that one.

And then drawing to the outcome, what were the product decisions, maybe you can, maybe you can't share, that were maybe surprising, or just like the cool things they got out of that study from the implementation of that data?

I mean, some of it validated my own personal crankiness, which was like the cable between them really sucks. And having like truly wireless earbuds that you can just use. Cause they had all these stories of like, I'll just use one. It's really hard to use just one if they're tethered. Yeah, mean, Beats does this clever thing where they have the like collar that sits on your neck. And so that makes it so that you can put.

with a cable that down, yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:46.83)
one only in your ear, but having like, it's a pure balanced thing with no, like nothing to anchor it on your neck, it would just basically drag the other one out. So was like one thing that we felt really solid in because it actually, like we had to do a lot of experimental stuff to get to truly wireless. Like Apple was way ahead on that. So that directly drove like, okay, we have to invest in this. It can't be a feature we can cut.

Because there was other mitigations, because part of why the cable beyond the one earbud use case, which we didn't realize was as popular as it was. I mean, now it's so obvious, like that's how people use AirPods all the time. This is when they were new and people thought they were silly, which is insane.

I think that I just take a break. I do think that Apple quietly like revolutionized pop culture with air pods and No one realized they're doing it until it's too late

Yeah, when they came out, they launched like just after the holiday. So they missed the holiday season, which is insane. They launched in like, I think January or December, like something like... Yeah, everyone made fun of them. People were embarrassed to wear them. And the thing Apple did, which is really hard for a company to do...

way too late to actually make holiday.

Speaker 1 (32:57.046)
is they white-knuckled through it and they kept selling them, they kept working on them, because they had worked on that product for at least four years leading up to that launch. They put a lot of time and effort into it. And then they kept going through it, and then by the next holidays, it turned around.

And what's crazy is they weren't the best headphones. They didn't have the best audio quality in the moment. They didn't have the best mic quality in the moment.

And I remember at that time as well, Beats was huge and the bass on your headphones was so important, at least with my generation for sure.

Well, and

gonna be annoying about this. They weren't the best headphones, but I think they were the best earbuds.

Speaker 2 (33:30.826)
You think they were like the original the launch set?

Yeah. Not an audio quality.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah got it. I'm going pure like they weren't the best audio quality But like what what they know was the user experience of the the headphones that are always with you and they work in every situation good enough and Therefore everyone's warm all the time right and I think that just changed pop culture Under the radar and it took a long time to change to become like no that did happen, but it totally did

no.

Speaker 1 (34:04.558)
Yeah, and they made a bunch of bold, like the bold decisions to like the, the STEM on, especially the original one was such a thing that people made fun of. and you know, they, there's all the memes where people cut the cord and then that's how Johnny gave came up with the aesthetic. But if you break it down, that STEM is powerful for so many reasons. Like, first of all, especially for a V1 product where they were having a hard time with battery, they could use a roll, like a jelly roll battery and not a coin cell. And so they didn't have to cert it for going inside your body. It was much easier to like.

out it moved the microphone closer to your face which was huge rather than like in here which on me is no big deal but if you have hair bigger deal like longer hair I do have some hair but and then also the antenna could use that whole

yeah, you have a long antenna now instead of a little patch antenna somewhere.

Yep. And then I gave you a whole stem for grabbing it and then leading it into the case. And there was a whole area for hitting the accelerometer. So there's so many benefits to that design, even though, yes, it looks lazy, but it's very intentional. And they stuck to it because it is a good design. They've made modifications since, but.

There's a lot of stuff they got right. And then they also were one of the first ones to do a battery in the case so that when you're not using it, it is charging. And that the effective battery life was way longer than the immediate battery life of a single bud.

Speaker 2 (35:29.494)
Right. Each in and the other thing is because they're not tethered together, when I get the doo-doo, they're both getting low. You put one in the case and it is charged up enough to use before the other one actually dies, which goes in the case. And then now you can play hot potato. If you're on a conference call that's going to last for five hours, right? Like a big meeting or whatever, you can use your AirPods continuously because one of them is charging while one of them is working. And I want to write this to the Bose engineers.

Whoever at Bose decided you can't charge and use Bluetooth on your headphones at the same time on my over years should be shot. Cause I can't believe that's a problem. If my Bose headphones die, they're done. They're cooked until you charge them again. And this is all about user experience and how products are built. And I feel like we got really off topic, but this has been super fun.

That specific problem is something that actually we ran into on our scale. Not to try and bring it back to product. is perfect. Yeah. One of the frequent complaints with Akaya scales for a cafe is that when it dies, and this is why they end up buying racks, they're great scales. That company makes a really nice product, but fundamentally it's USB charging and you can't use it while it's charging for two reasons. One, it...

yeah?

Speaker 1 (36:44.056)
that's not how the circuit works the way they designed it, but two, the port is attached to the way pan. So, cause it's, it's reverse loaded. fundamentally, even if they change the circuit,

It should hit the cable if it was going to weigh down.

Yeah, like the cable or rather like the cable would be adding weight to the thing you're weighing.

Yeah, it's gonna, you the cable's in now your measurement, not in the base platform that's connected to your table. Yeah, who knows if the cable moves around?

and stuff like that. Exactly, yeah. So we were very intentional on our device to make it so that the WayPan was separate from where the USB-C port was. There are other trade-offs that come with that, but then we really wanted it so that you could just leave it plugged in if you are a cafe and use it all day and not have to think about it.

Speaker 2 (37:31.136)
That's so important. I so appreciate when people are making battery-powered products that don't skip over the I know it's complex but hot plug plug and play whatever you want to call it like hot swap while charging I can it's about to die I can plug it in continue use I can unplug it and take it somewhere else walls being used without interrupting use but I can use it plugged in or wireless or both both

because it's so critical to user experience where I'm not interrupting my flow if the battery is getting dead for whatever reason. Whatever my product is, mouse, headphones, weight, scale for coffee grounds.

Yeah, exactly. is a choice like that, like, classically, is that UX? Is that industrial design? Is that engineering? Like, it's all of Yes, like it's all of it. And that's where, that's the exact kind of thing that can fall through the cracks, right? Because there is no, like, obvious, here's the home for where that decision lives. And it's the kind of stuff I love doing. But yeah, that's like, that's the game.

It's a product.

Speaker 3 (38:28.696)
Totally. I think that answers back to the original statement you had at beginning, kind of you creating your own kind of label or name for what you do. Right. And I think you're exactly right. I find that folks that are deeply passionate about something, even if it falls into a category, the reason categories exist because someone created a name for it and described it a category. seems like from design, you do the exact same thing because you're passionate about it. You create your own name if you want to, because you can also like leave your own kind of stamp on the market at large. One of the last questions I've

got is for advice for early designers. You've been at Google. You've helped with the Pixel earbuds. You've obviously done all the things you've done at Fellow. And it's the story you've shared over the last 35, 45 minutes has been fantastic. What sort of advice do you have for someone just starting out in industrial design or insert the name for what you really need to do? And what things you think they should be thinking about and focusing on in 2025?

Sure, I I think for starters, a lot of people, when you watch a movie or you watch a film, you get this idea that everyone finds their calling, it sort of like runs into them, and that then you know what you're gonna do for the rest of your life and you're good. And I think the reality is, sure, some people, they're lucky enough for that to happen, that didn't happen to me, maybe a little bit, but not really.

Like there's some people who knew they were going to be a doctor from day one. They said it to be a doctor. They became a doctor and they're like, hell yeah. I love being a doctor. Yeah. Good for them. Must be nice. I think for everyone else, like in a world where you really value wanting to have your job and your career be something that's really core to your identity or like you like as a big part of your life, then

Yeah, this is everything I ever thought it would be.

Speaker 1 (40:22.446)
think you really need to spend a lot of time investing in finding what that is. And I think it takes, if you're not one of the lucky few people, it takes a lot of active time, thought, and effort to get there. And some of that is trying a bunch of stuff, like especially in school where you have access to a lot of things to try. People are really nice to you because you're like, fundamentally you say you're a student and that's like a label that's really useful to just like roll up to different people and ask for advice and...

Or internship or a job. Yeah, and you're you're adorable come home with me. We'll go try this out I do this to interns all the time. They just have the right personality that might not even have a right technical fit But because of where they're at I'm like I'll you try anything once

Yeah, and it's just like trying a lot of stuff. Dude, that takes so much time and effort. And like, you gotta do it, right? And then not just trying it, but then being continually critiquing, like, okay, did I like that? Why? Like, is it the verbs of what I was doing? Is it the like, conceptual? Is it like how it made me look in the community or feel like?

All of those are valuable to different things for different people. Is it the service you're providing? I think critiquing and trying a bunch of stuff and then critiquing and understanding what is it about it that made you really love it, I think is huge. And that helps you then iterate and get hopefully to the point that you find something that you really love. I do think it's worthwhile to not be fully...

trapped by like whatever exact product or exact titles and things that you see on the market as like the only options you have. Now, as it is, there's quite a lot of options. So like it's worth trying a bunch of this stuff before just like making stuff up. But like you shouldn't feel limited by it. The thing I'll caveat is the second you reject an existing title, like all of the existing titles and try and forge your own path.

Speaker 1 (42:14.36)
There's a lot of stuff you get for free by picking a title that people understand or unfamiliar with that now you are, whether you like it or not, you're burdening yourself with doing. And if you don't, if you don't take this on, you're to have a bad time and feel misunderstood. So some of that is from a business perspective, what is your value? from a team perspective, who do like, who needs to be around you? Who do you collaborate with? How are you inserted?

And then like, what, like who needs to, like, what, what, which home do you live in? Right? Like if you're saying you don't ascribe to any one thing, you still need, like, unless you're, is also really valuable to understand.

your own place right that that's how I was

Biomedical engineers when they're interviewing a glassboard. I'm like alright We don't hire biomedical engineers as a like I don't have a role for that Do you identify as a mechanical engineer an electrical engineer or a software engineer embedded or otherwise? Because all biomedical engineers are one of the major engineering disciplines in a trench coat studying You know the human body or biology more so than that one core skill But they're all focused in one and I always make them identify and they hate the question they're the grand they're like no I'm a biomedical engineer. I'm like that's cool

I'm going to pretend you told me you're a mechanical engineer with a specialty in biology and human mechanics. And that's awesome. I hire for that. And it's the thing that to emulate what you just said, if you're going to reject a title like mechanical engineer that I might hire for or industrial designer that I might hire for or UX UI designer that I might hire for, I only have those roles on my website. You're going to apply for one of those jobs and tell me you do insert other thing. I might hire you anyways, but you have to convince me that you can do that job and a special thing that you bring to the table.

Speaker 1 (43:56.642)
Yeah. And that's the other half of this, right? Like whether you're rejecting a known title or not, think understanding, like when you're replying to a job, if you're doing that and not forging like truly your own like totally off road path, understanding the place you're applying to, right? are they a place that hires specialists and they're building it like a team of who sums up to a whole, or are they hiring a bunch of generalists intentionally so, or then it's fluid, or are they a big company who's doing a mix of both? think like understanding the dynamics of the place that you're applying to and

and really speaking to that in your cover letter, speaking to that in like what you're presenting in your portfolio. And I think like a portfolio is a powerful tool for basically everyone who makes stuff, whether you're an engineer or a designer. I think especially for an engineer because fewer engineers have portfolios. It's just like a visual way to show what you did.

I am sorry.

Speaker 2 (44:47.342)
I'm clipping all of that and that is going in our job posting website. if doubt shall not need apply without a portfolio, no matter what your title is at Glassboard. That is like, preach this at career fairs to all the young mechanical, electrical, engineers. like, write down all the goofy stuff that you do. I don't care if it's in a robotics club or a go-kart club or a Rube Goldberg competition or you're making a project yourself. Just snap some photos, write down three bullet points in a PowerPoint and keep adding to this PowerPoint from your freshman year until you graduate and submit that with your resume.

haphazard it doesn't have to be beautiful doesn't have to be organized just let me see your you know fluid thought process as a designer of any kind yeah and that's gonna get me to hire you ten times over your resume that said you had a 4.0 and attended these courses and might have had a cool internship at some company I know of or not right

Yeah, I don't know the rubric. I don't know who gave you that grade.

Yeah, I don't care. But man, that design looked cool or that thought process of going from, wanted to make a better IoT connected toaster, my favorite fictitious thing, and how you iterated through that. I want to see the design process, your design language. What questions you asked and tested first. That's fascinating to me.

Yeah, and like not just what did you do, but why? Right? Like, I tried xyz thing. This didn't work. So I did this. It's a very like

Speaker 2 (46:04.25)
And I cared to test XYZ first because ABC was important to me and XYZ was the test for ABC. And I knew I could figure out how to make toast. I didn't know if I knew how to do IoT or maybe it's vice versa. Some of those great IoT and I had no idea how to make delicious toast.

I think you guys are really hitting around the head. mean, it's kind of showing that you have the ability to solve problems. mean, that's kind of fundamentally what an organization, especially we live in America, so it's capitalistic. And so in a business, your job is to basically ongoing solve problems. You solve problems consistently in design. Grant solves problems consistently in engineering and for the business at large.

I'm bad at this.

We're at least paid to do it. And I'm not saying that we do it very well. And then I saw problems like go to market for like startups and things like that. It's like figure out what you what you enjoy solving problems for. And you'll find that even if you're applying for a mechanical role and you join an organization, you can still bring who you are. Your ability to solve X problem, even though it might fit into a different box, the organization will typically, from what I've seen, like welcome that they want you to come in and be able to solve problems different ways that other folks can't do it. So absolutely, we just would encourage folks that

Everything Basher just said absolutely. Double click. Yeah, double click on that. Display your ability to solve problems in the way that you solve problems, because that's unique and that's valuable.

Speaker 1 (47:16.994)
Yeah, the other thing I'll add is if you do have a portfolio, and I think especially so for designers, it doesn't really matter what classes you took or why the things are in there that got in there, but fundamentally, you can't walk away from what's in your portfolio and the portion of the portfolio that you spend on certain things will always be taken at face value as you care about this. So if you ended up taking a lot of biomedical equipment design

classes and your whole portfolio is biomedical equipment and you apply to a skateboard company, they're going to be confused. Right. And if you want to change that, the power of a portfolio is that you can go do a bunch of personal projects. And again, if you can explain your problem solving process, it's way harder, right? Because like probably you have to have another job and you're trying to balance other things. So what I'm suggesting is not easy. But I think if you really want to work at that skateboard company and you never did any skateboard projects and you should probably delete all your biomedical projects in your portfolio, put

a bunch of skateboard projects in there and apply to the skateboard company. A lot of it is like, what's the risk, right? Like, can this person do this thing? It's really easy to answer that question of, yeah, because they've done it a lot before.

And I like what I see when they've done it. as a hiring manager, they say, oh man, I like the way they sketch that. I would be proud to present that to a client. Or I like the question they asked in their portfolio, like, I wondered how I could make toast better. And then you saw that their first test was to not build a toaster, but to truly measure what good toast was. If that is the first step, it's telling me how their design thinking works.

And even drilling down deeper, like even as banal as this is, if let's say you did a bunch of user research in designing your IoT toaster, or maybe it just took so much time and effort for you, a lot of people will then put, like they'll match the percentage of their portfolio page that they spend on something to the amount of time and energy they spent on it, rather than how much they care about a thing. And there's so many times I've talked to a student who has a portfolio where like half of it is user research because that's what the class made them do. And they spent, you know, they did in their

Speaker 1 (49:20.312)
of the work they did there, but they have no interest in ever doing that work ever again. And yet here it is half their portfolio pages used a research. And when I look at this, wow, it like they really like doing this work. so I think just being really thoughtful about like, yeah, what work are you showing? And you should really only put work in your portfolio that you want to do more of. Cause people, if they like it, we'll ask you to do more of it.

I'm going to hire you.

Speaker 2 (49:42.934)
And how do you present it? Because again, if I'm hiring for a mechanical engineer, I don't really care how organized their portfolio is or how beautiful it looks or how it makes you feel when I open it. I'm looking for like, do they do like ask good questions and build good tests and build cool robots or whatever they're building IoT toasters. But if I'm hiring for a primarily like industrial design role, I'm looking at how they sketch. I'm looking at the font they chose in their portfolio and how they organize and all the line spacing and the weighting is good. And does the white space look beautiful? And does it make me want to click to the next

no matter whatever that I'm interested in, IoT toasters or race cars. It's all about the visual presentation because that's the role I'm hiring for. So it is one of those things that your portfolio visually, amount of percentage per topic, holistically is a representation of you as a person and your skills and your interests.

Yeah, yeah. And then the only other sort of common trap I see is this correlation between a complex problem is how you get to a complex or interesting solution. And then people end up wasting, especially where otherwise they don't need to do this, but for a personal project especially where they end up having a project where the first 45 % of the project is explaining to you what this even is. They're like,

multiple paragraphs deep into micropipetting before you even understand what is the project they're doing, what is the problem they're solving, what's the task they're doing. And I think, in as much as, unless you're gonna go into an incredibly niche industry, for a personal project, as best as you can, keep the briefs really, really simple, and then have what is complex is in the fidelity and amazingness of your output. But your ceiling of...

how interesting your solution can be is not limited by how interesting the problem is. More complex.

Speaker 2 (51:36.45)
complex. think because again, ironically, in design, my favorite solutions are the simplest. Right? man, there's this simple problem that I didn't even see as a problem in my everyday life. And someone made that simple problem that I had already written off as just part of doing life go away in an elegant way. And their solution wasn't complex. They solved it with a very small change to the status quo that made the experience better in that product, whatever that is, as simple as removing the wire between two earbuds.

Or the things that you guys have done as well. You're taking a technology that's widely used in another sector of the coffee industry. we're going to switch it up a little bit. It'll solve that problem here. Done.

fellow spent the last 10 years and probably spend the next 10 years and more figuring out different ways to put hot water on beans. like, let me tell you, there's a lot of complicated ways you can do it.

I love that.

Well, to that, everybody, this is the Hard Tech Podcast. I'm your host, De'Andre Hericus. My co-host, Grant Chapman. Basher, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for being on the show.

Speaker 1 (52:40.12)
Thanks for having me.