June 08, 2023

179: Maximize the Value of your Design Agency Partner

18 minutes

Nick Allen is an industrial design at MAKO Design. Nick has been designing products for 15 years, working with over 100 products and earning multiple design awards including the coveted Red Dot award. Today Nick is going to share some valuable knowledge for inventors, startups, and small manufacturers on how to start working on a project with your hardware product development partner so that you can maximize the value of the relationship, thus leading to creating a top notch product and even more important, a successful hardware startup business

Today you will hear us talk about:

Focus on your vision. Know what you know, don’t worry about what you don’t know.

Leverage your experience.

What the product needs to do and what it needs to do.

Write it down.

Have a basic sketch of your idea

Bullet point notes on your customer

Must have, must not have.

Design intent

Accept pushback from the design engineers.

Must have vs want to have features / MVP

Work with your design team to reign in the feature creep.

Team effort in original features

You can always release version 2.0

EPISODE LINKS:

Nick Allen Links:

LinkedIn | MAKO Design

The Product Startup Podcast Links:

https://www.ProductStartup.com/

MAKO Design Links:

https://www.makodesign.com/

Kevin Mako Links:

Instagram | LinkedIn | Quora | Facebook | Twitter

Partner: PTC’s best-in-class software solutions Onshape: The only cloud-native product development platform that delivers full-featured computer-aided design (CAD), integrated product data management (PDM) and enterprise analytics in a single system, and Creo: 3D CAD solution that provides designers with the most innovative tools to build better products faster, such as generative design, additive manufacturing, real-time simulation, IIoT, and augmented reality.

Producer: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop-shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and manufacturing services. To assist our startup and inventor clients, in addition to above, we help with business strategy, product strategy, marketing, and sales/distribution for all consumer product categories.