An Education in the Prototyping Process by a YouTube Star
I'm not sure exactly when I got hooked on This Old Tony's YouTube channel, it was several years back, but I have long since appreciated his unique combination of humor and manufacturing knowledge that he uses to both entertain and educate people. His latest video was another home run for me and thousands of others who eagerly await for notifications about his latest content. While reviewing the video this past weekend, I couldn't help but admire his ability to demonstrate the prototyping process without even mentioning it, and I compared each of his stages with what our team currently does and found great similarities even though his product is mechanical and ours is software. Take note on how This Old Tony progresses through the steps of design concept to working prototype as quickly and cheaply as possible.
The very first iteration of this sharpening jig idea is merely a cardboard cutout with some standard nuts and bolts easily found at the local hardware store or home garage. This is a brilliant way to get started with product development, keeping things as cheap as possible. Many are tempted to start their creation with an elaborate design using some expensive software and whatever resources are at their disposal to hurry up and realize the vision, but this is very risky to say the least. What if all the components are not so easy to create? What if some needed technology or some material is not available? How easily will this function once the pieces are all together? These and many other questions are what you're trying to flush out the answers for early on, so start with the cheapest means possible and begin testing right away to find the faults in the idea. But how would this apply to software?
For the product I work on, my early prototyping for any planned feature is usually done with slide shows. By combining screen shots, clip art, and hyperlinks, I can make something look like working software as the slide show will jump to predesignated slides as I click on a phony button or some kind of user input. This creates the illusion of realizing my idea to help me understand how it should work at least at the high level before the designer and developers get involved, but the testing doesn't stop with me. Getting real users involved at the earliest stages will help determine whether or not something is worth the effort.
In software, product managers use a few methods for testing early on to determine market acceptance of an idea, and the one I personally employ the most is Concept Testing. This involves taking my previously described slide show and displaying it before several target customers to get their feedback. The importance of this can't be overstated as it can help prevent a great deal of wasted time and money by determining the desirability as early as possible.
The time of the development staff is the most precious commodity a software business has, and the primary job of a product manager is to protect it to the best of their ability by trying to make sure it isn't wasted. This can be accomplished through early testing. Most developers I have worked with never seem to care about what they are working on, but rather how the solution is created. If the product or feature they make turns out to be a flop in the market because the idea didn't turn out to be very popular, then those people's time can never be recuperated, and thus the company loses money.
After This Old Tony's carboard and cheap hardware prototype has proven the concept, he moves on to an official design, but not yet to the intended end state. Instead, he 3D prints the initial design to do some additional testing with before committing the more expensive resources to the idea. Again, testing in multiple stages can save a great deal of time and money.
In our software development, this middle stage is what I consider to be our team's research portion of the process. I get the UX designer to use his high end design software to create a better sort of blueprint that we can use for planning a feature with, but we also get one designated developer to start doing some research to determine the feasibility of the idea. Just because the prototype looks nice and the early indications of the market seem favorable doesn't immediately determine whether or not you should just go ahead and run with it. Further testing is still needed.
At the conclusion of the research, the developer will report to the team whether the idea can be fully realized and how much it may cost. In some cases, the full extent of the feature just may not be feasible due to the existing technology stack or other limitations, which may require the product manager to pare down the idea to a smaller subset. This may also require the PM to fall back to the previous prototyping stage just to see if the subset feature will be acceptable by potential or existing customers, which can seem like a setback, but don't become discouraged as the real goal is protecting the time of the development team.
The other bit of research concerns the viability of a product or idea. Perhaps the idea is indeed possible, but at what cost? How expensive would the resources be to realize the full extent of the idea? A higher expense may be due to internal or external dependencies, or many other factors. In any case, this could also end up in a redesign of the original idea as a pared down version that requires a round of desirability testing before moving forward.
Toward the end, This Old Tony does create a real working prototype that further proves the value, but even still he is not completely happy with the results. Sure, the pruners do end up with a sharpness that is closer to factory edge than what was possible before, but there are still improvements that need to be made, and This Old Tony acknowledges this. The product design process is indeed very circular, or perhaps spiral shaped, and requires us to rethink things many times over before it's just right for the market.
Our software team has also experienced this by releasing features for beta testing and then rethinking the design after receiving more customer feedback. The process isn't perfect, and it never will be as things are in a constant state of change. The important thing is to create the minimal value as quickly as possible to realize the bigger overall value in due time.
What would be more interesting to add to This Old Tony's video would be a calculation of the TAM, SAM, and SOM of the sharpening jig product by a proper business development manager. This starts with figuring out the total market of people who desire a factory edge for their pruners after some heavy use. The number dwindles further when the jig tool is designed for a specific brand of pruners or their knockoff copies.
I have experienced this limitation myself with creating products only compatible with other specific products, which can indeed create a challenge for finding a number of potential customers. It can be done with some creativity, however.
Next, This Old Tony's target market really plummets when you factor in the idea that this sharpening jig is intended to be used by someone who owns a surface grinder and and a sine plate and knows how to use them. At this point, the pricing for the jig tool will be very costly indeed if any money is to be made by a manufacturer who intends to sell this to the very few interested customers. However, This Old Tony does acknowledge the very limited use case for his idea up front by placing the word "Unnecessary" in the title. He also mentions as much in the beginning of the video.
Of course, the unnecessary sharpening jig or any of his past creations are not This Old Tony's real products, but rather the video content on YouTube. Here again is a fantastic example of the product development process as This Old Tony has refined his video creation process to perfection. The high quality content that you see today didn't always exist. Have you ever watched one of his earliest videos?
They are not exactly the same level of entertainment and industrial education that a viewer receives now, but the creator clearly kept testing to find what works for a greater target market, which, by the way, includes more people than just machinists, welders, or manufacturers. Indeed, his videos are so entertaining that my own children will gladly sit and watch even though they have a limited interest in manufacturing, and therein lies This Old Tony's genius. He took a subject matter that is interesting to only a specific set of people and found a way to widen the audience significantly. With over one million subscribers now, who can argue with the results?
This Old Tony knocked the ball out of the park yet again with another fantastic video. In the midst of the entertainment and industrial education, the content of this latest video will teach anybody a great lesson in the prototyping process. Whether you work with software or physical products, the example shown here will guide you toward a path to success.