- The speaker discusses the hardware journey of building products
- They believe in the intersection of engineering and beauty to create products that improve people's lives with technology
- They have been involved in the Internet of Things before it became popular
- They emphasize the need for an organizing principle in the Internet of Things to make it easier for users to interact with smart devices
- They believe wearables will be the center of the connected and smart revolution, driving interactions and experiences
- They focus on building great hardware, software, and data capabilities to create a holistic user experience
- Their creation process involves exploration, validation, concepting, planning, development, launch, and learning from user feedback.

- The company goes through a process of exploration, validation, concept, and development for their products
- Demo Fridays and hackathons are used to showcase work and gather feedback
- The strategic development team leads the exploration phase, while executives provide feedback
- The validation phase involves R&D and the industrial design team, who work on physical prototypes
- The concept phase is led by the product experience team, who focus on design and storytelling
- The product managers then take over to define the business plan and make trade-offs
- The final decision maker determines if the product meets the minimum viability threshold
- The development phase involves engineering and further refinement of the product
- The company focuses on solving user problems and creating experiences that users can't live without.

- The market for wireless speakers was initially 0% in 2010, but grew to 78% by 2013.
- The company believed in creating a seamless and high-quality audio experience for mobile phones.
- They saw the opportunity to enter the home market through speakers and expand into other software and services.
- User research focused on behavior and needs rather than specific product features.
- The company applied a similar strategy to their health tracking product, UP24, by focusing on tracking, understanding, and acting on data.

- The tracking part of building a wearable device involves designing the hardware and ensuring it is easy to use and wear.
- Simply visualizing data is not enough; it is important to contextualize and turn the data into actionable information.
- Action is key in designing a successful wearable device.
- Different users have different needs and motivations, so experiences and features should be tailored accordingly.
- Notifications can be used as a tool for behavior change.
- Designing a system involves considering tradeoffs and constraints across different components.
- Communication and collaboration are important when designing complex systems.
- A startup should approach building a system by thinking holistically rather than focusing on one small thing.
- System thinking involves considering how different features and functions work together.
- A grand unified vision is important in creating related products in the same space.
- The process and thinking evolve as the product is iterated upon and launched.

- The speaker discusses the process of starting something new from scratch and the importance of learning from failures.
- They explain how they can skip certain steps in the development process if they already know the solution will work.
- The speaker mentions that their company has grown to around 500 employees and has offices in various locations, which presents communication challenges.
- They emphasize the importance of communication and collaboration between team members.
- The decision to expand geographically was deliberate but also opportunistic, depending on partnerships and market suitability.
- The speaker explains that they have not entered the headphone market because they want to make sure they have a proposition that significantly improves upon existing products.
- They acknowledge the challenges of running a hardware company and discuss their approach of combining the best practices of software and hardware development.
- The speaker concludes by stating that their goal is to become equally great at hardware, software, and data.

- The speaker discusses the hardware journey of building products, emphasizing the intersection of engineering and beauty to improve people's lives with technology.
- They have experience in the Internet of Things and believe in the need for an organizing principle to simplify user interactions with smart devices.
- Wearables are seen as the center of the connected and smart revolution, driving interactions and experiences.
- The company focuses on creating a holistic user experience through great hardware, software, and data capabilities.
- Their creation process involves exploration, validation, concepting, planning, development, launch, and learning from user feedback.
- User research focuses on behavior and needs rather than specific product features.
- The company has successfully entered the wireless speaker market, aiming to provide a seamless audio experience for mobile phones and expand into other software and services.
- They have also applied a similar strategy to their health tracking product, UP24, by focusing on tracking, understanding, and acting on data.
- Designing wearable devices involves considering ease of use, contextualizing data, and tailoring experiences to different user needs.
- Communication and collaboration are important in designing complex systems.
- The company has grown to around 500 employees and has offices in various locations, emphasizing the importance of communication and collaboration between team members.
- They have deliberately expanded geographically based on partnerships and market suitability.
- The company aims to become equally great at hardware, software, and data.

Lecture Transcript: http://tech.genius.com/Hosain-rahman-lecture-17-how-to-build-products-users-love-part-ii-annotated

Hosain Rahman, CEO and Founder of Jawbone, covers the design process for building hardware products users love.

See the readings at http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec17

Discuss this lecture: http://startupclass.co/courses/how-to-start-a-startup/lectures/64046

Very exciting, and thank you, Sam, for having me.

Sam and I have known each other for a long time, because we were fellow Sequoia companies, and we met in the early days of when he was on his company journey.

So what he asked me to talk about today was a little bit about sort of the hardware journey of building products.

And so what I want to do is give you guys a little bit of an overview of job on what we do, how we think about the world.

And then go specifically into the process of how we design, how we develop, and how that all kind of comes together.

And sort of what we do to change categories.

So, first off, I always like to start with sort of the broadest thinking.

And the way we look at the world is we think of ourselves at this intersection of really crafted innovation in engineering that's almost invisible to the user in terms of its functionality.

And that's at the intersection of even beyond design.

We've been doing design products for well over a decade now.

We think of it as going, the conversation has shifted even beyond design into beauty.

And it's that intersection of engineering meets beauty, And the whole point is to help people with a better life, with technology.

And largely speaking, we, we do play in this world of what everyone's talking about now is the Internet of Things.

We were there much longer before there was such a, a moniker.

And the way we think about that is it's smart devices that have computing power and connectivity with sensors in them that are measuring all kinds of things.

They're wirelessly connected and they're all talking to you.

And we started on this journey really, really early, right actually out of engineering school here.

We decided to build consumer products around that.

Our first consumer product was a headset.

We sort of created a headset that became a wearable computer.

That was when we started thinking about wearable computing.

We then invented the wireless speaker space around Bluetooth audio, and I'll talk a little bit about that journey.

And then most recently, we focused our attention on this whole wearable health revolution and using a lot of the sensors that we did in the first generation of headsets and applying them to other parts of the body to understand more about users.

So our view of this world, having been here for a long time, is that it's a little bit of a mess in the Internet of Things.

Everything in the world is smart and connected, and everything has an app built to it, that doesn't mean that it's easy for users, right?

Your microwave, your refrigerator, your car, your Xbox, your Xfinity, Comcast, everything has an app.

So we think that there's a desperate need for an organizing principle around all of this.

And this is sort of the core of when we start to think about how we build and opportunities to sort of create products.

And so if there is gonna be such a world that everyone's talking about around the Internet of Things, which is happening.

You do desperately need these organizing principles so that it's easier for users to understand how to come in and interact with these services.

So we think the thinking needs to shift from being less about the actual things to being about the individual user.

And so ultimately, when everyone's talking about wearables and you have things like Google Glass, and you have the stuff that we do, and you know, Apple Watch, and all this stuff, ultimately what we believe is that when you have things that are on your body 24-7, they become this kind of perfect context engine for everything in the world around you, right?

So my phone is not on me, it's in my jacket or sometimes on the charger, but my app is on me.

And it, it understands everything that's happening with me.

It's tracking my heart rate, it's tracking my respiration, it's tracking all these different things.

And when I, when I say context engine, I know I can tell the smart thermostat in my nest that I'm hot or cold.

That device doesn't have that understanding.

I can tell it's hot, but that device I'm hot because I'm sick, I went for a run, it's hot outside.

I can tell your car that you're falling asleep, that you're agitated or irritated.

So this is ultimately where we think the world is moving is that wearables are going to be the center of this, this revolution about everything being connected and smart, and they're going to drive what a lot of those interactions are going to be and how they're going to work.

And so that's sort of the first principle that we think about when we start to think about, okay, where are things going and what we should, should we build and how do we think about new categories, right?

So in order for the vision of what we're talking about to happen, you actually need to be great at almost everything.

We need to be great at what we call the full stack.

We have to be amazing at building hardware.

And these are hardware experiences that people have to keep on all the time, right?

Cuz if you don't, then everything that I'm talking about is sort of a castle in the air, right?

You can't actually create a service that people engage with or get lots of data off it to then go power all these other things if it doesn't start with great hardware.

We try to build these magical experiences in hardware that absolutely powered by software.

We have developed world class software application expertise.

We've gotta be as good there from an engagement perspective as something like an Instagram or WhatsApp.

And then on the data side, we've gotta know what to do with this massive amount of information and process it and push it and have it work for the user.

So we really see ourselves as being at the intersection for the first time of a company that's doing hardware, software and data as 3 kind of equal stools that have to work together in order to unlock that experience around something that's on you, knowing what's happening, and then talking to the rest of the world around you.

So that's a pretty key piece of what we do.

I think it's different than what a lot of other companies do.

And it allows us and requires us to play at all levels of stack.

Now this was a complicated thing for us to put together, because typically people who are great at hardware understand mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, how those things interact, how you build at scale, how you build tools, etc.

They're not typically great at building software and services, right?

It's a very different discipline, a very different skill set.

So when we first put those pieces together, that created a lot of really interesting friction in the company.

Our software and application team was so used to moving really, really fast and iterating, whereas in the hardware world, you've got to take your time because your iteration cycles are much more deliberate.

You can't just tweak stuff and you can't hack it in the same way.

And so what was interesting to see is we put all these pieces together.

The hardware team learning to move faster.

The software guys thinking more about how do they resolve experiences before you actually have to ship it versus just throwing something out and A, B testing it.

And then the data science sort of informs all of that with sort of more information to make different kinds of decisions.

So, How do we think about, how do we go, how do we build products, how do we change categories?

First of all, everything for us is a system, right?

We don't think about it discreetly just as a piece of hardware, discreetly as an application, or discreetly as a platform.

We think about it across the whole thing.

And so this is an example with Up, right, where we have these tracking sensors on the body, algorithms there.

It connects to the phone where you have this engaging application service experience.

That talks to a lot of stuff that we're doing in the cloud where we're taking all that information, driving insight on it, and then we have a huge platform of thousands of developers, where they have thousands of apps that then plug in and also create more experiences.

And so we think about it across the whole spectrum.

And I'll come back to this system think in a second.

So what does the actual process of creation look like?

And this is fun for me, because we don't actually talk about this very often.

It's quite, you know, sort of we keep it confidential and private, and I know that we are- Now we're being- Talking, now that we're on sort of a live cast, every, So it's fun for me to talk about this for the first time.

Cuz it's not, it's quite a deliberate process, right?

And this is a little bit of what it looks like.

And this is kind of a map where we are very unbridled in our imagination in the exploration phase.

We start to validate some of our concepts, bring those ideas tighter and tighter and tighter, and then we actually start to build a product, launch it, and then iterate, right?

I'll take you through each of these steps.

So, in the exploration phase, it is very wild, it's imaginative.

We think about the vision of where the world's going, what our strategy is, what does the brand stand for.

And we think of a lot of, of, of what you guys do here.

You're dreaming, you're imagining it, how do you disrupt, what's the future gonna look like, right?

It is a little bit science projecty sometimes, and, and, and we talk about it in that way, right?

And we do build from inspiration and insight.

And that, and it's sort of raw creativity.

And we want to create, and we try to create a form where that's okay, because a lot of times in companies that gets lost.

And then, when we start bringing it to early validation, where I always say like, look, everyone, when you're doing this stuff, you have to now take those concepts and prove them a little bit like you do a PhD thesis, right, where you have your conclusions, you've done your, you know, empirical data collection.

And you start to say, look, here's where we see it going.

And then once we've sort of signed off on that phase, that we think, okay, you know what?

We start to go into a concepting phase, where we start to really think about what is the experience and what's possible.

And this is, this is another interesting opportunity for innovation at a more specific level of how this thing will come to life, or what it is, and how will we sell that experience, and how would we tell that story?

And then we decide that it's a program, and it goes into a heavy planning phase.

We start to look at it and say, okay, we're doing this, we've gotta ship it.

What are the trade-offs between all the creativity and all the ideas we want versus what does the physics dictate, what do, you know, battery power or all the different constraints that we have and start making those tradeoffs.

And start to look at, you know, how do we pull that together?

And then we move into a development phase, where it's a handoff between various stages and, and really various functional teams in the company.

And you pull it together and you're solving problems as you go implement this.

And then you start to think about where does this stand in that experience continuum that you've been imagining, where the world's gonna go.

What have we achieved, what haven't, what have we learned from our users?

How does that change what we're thinking?

And then we start right over again, right?

So that's the broadest way to think about it.

A little bit deeper on the exploration phase, right?

So it is very much like a building and tinkering process, right?

And a lot of it is driven by what we call demo Fridays, where people kind of have an opportunity to go showcase their work, because we find that that's a great way to pull it together, pull it in a form that others can consume it and give feedback, right?

And it's a really, it is a show and tell.

Obviously, hackathons are a big part of it.

And it's led by our strategic development team, which is traditionally called sort of an R&D team.

And there's participation from product and engineering, both hardware and software.

But they're sort of taking a back seat and they're looking at what these explorations are, right?

And the executives in the company at this phase are more of a signing board.

They're there to poke and prod and tell people, hey, think about this, or did you try that?

So, and in this phase, in order to move to the next threshold, we think about it literally as, hey, would I give this guy 50 grand?

It's a little bit like an angel investment, right?

Would I give this guy 50 grand to go explore this and see if there's a there there?

And our CTO is the, is the sort of final decision maker.

He gets to sort of pick those things internally and say, you know what, I, I like all the feedback.

This is the 1 I want to go chase down and see what happens, right?

So then we get into this validation phase, and this is where it starts to get really interesting.

Still led by R&D, but they're really poking at it and they're saying, how does this work?

We have these leadership meetings with the broader cross-functional team.

I have to go through a scientific process to outline why this works.

And you'll hear, this is really when we start formulating a really important tool that we use in the company, which is what we call WISE, defining the why are we doing this?

I'm going to come back to that in deeper in a minute, right?

And so at this point, it's still an R&D lead, but this is when a lot of our industrial design team, Yves Behar and a few project guys, they come in, they start to think about, okay, how can I pull this concept into something physical if it's hardware?

And how's that gonna interact with the rest of the pieces of the system?

Our product experience team is still also driving a lot of the core values and what the storyboarding is.

This is when we start thinking about, okay, how would we build this?

And at that point, right, we start to really validate, can we actually build it?

Or do we have to wait 3 years for batteries to be there?

Or do we have to wait for this other innovation to happen?

Or do we have to wait from a budget perspective?

Or whatever it is, is there a business viability?

And then we start to really start to sketch kind of briefs.

And this is where I come in and make the final decision on, okay, I think there's really a there there.

And we can now take this to the next level and get it into a play.

And then we go into the concept phase, right?

And this is now when the responsibility shifts from the R&D folks to what we call product experience team.

And the way we think about product experience at Jawbone is sort of what everyone thinks of as sort of conventional design.

So from industrial design to software design, to audio design, to anything that touches that experience.

We have writers on that team, storytellers.

We have ID people like Eve, who are genius creatives.

We have amazing app level designers, graphic designers, everything.

It's all in 1 team and we call that product experience.

And their job is sort of from bits to atoms and back and all the way through to unify as 1 organization.

And that's when they sort of take a hold of this and they start to really kind of work out what is, what is, and this is what we call when you're starting to really drive the wise, right?

Thinking about what's possible, there's a lot of innovation and creativity now in the actual implementation of how we're gonna build.

And we start to say like, what are the most important things in that product?

What are the most important problems we're going to solve?

How, what is the bar that will be acceptable, etc., right?

And at this point, we start to really resolve what we call these whys, which I'll show you again in a minute.

And why is that different from what anyone else has done?

From the competition, from the category, and then what is, where does it go, right?

It's, we don't like to do just one-off things.

We have to see a broader vision, and this is part of that, that creation experience.

As we look at where do we think the world is moving and how is this thing gonna be a stepping stone to that ultimate end vision.

And that's where the roadmap starts to get fleshed out.

Again, I have the ability here to come in and sort of be the final decision maker with my team and say, yep, we're gonna move this to this next phase.

And here is also where we look at some of these things.

And when I get into some of these specific examples, we have fast track programs, right?

So we took, for example, the Jambox when we were in this phase, and we said, we're not going to go through the other phases, we're going to go straight into the development process, right?

Because we wanna get this thing out, we wanna test it in market, and move really quickly.

So we have the ability to sort of circumvent our own process now and say like, okay, let's go, let's go really rapid and fast track it and recalibrate kind of the go to market possibilities, right?

So this is when we, after this stage now, it shifts from that product experience team to our product managers who are really defining the business plan.

When's it gonna get into the retail calendar?

When does, what is the software release cycle?

Really prototyping, actually starting to feel it.

And you're starting to make, as I call, a lot of those trade-offs where like, okay, we wanted to build this.

We can't do that, but here's what we can do.

We have to, you know, we want these functional experiences, but we're going to sacrifice battery life.

Whatever it is, that's where we start to really kind of pull those decisions and start looking at it.

And it's really a big juggling act, frankly, at that point, right, and so the product guys are driving that.

And that's when, again, we sort of look in and synthesize all of what we've put together and we say, okay, does it actually cross enough things off our list, does it meet that minimum viability, right?

Cuz we always start with a very, as you can tell, like this very big wish list of what's possible and what we can do and then we start to whittle it down and say does this cross enough of the value threshold that we think that it's worth pursuing and now can actually move it into the development phase where again product management continues to lead it.

But now you're starting to really get deep and this is where engineering comes in and is really starting to sign off on like we can build it.

And then again, you know, product team is looking at how should we go deeper on this?

What are all the things that we need to do to sort of make that?

And 1 of the things that we've been fortunate to have is a lot of wonderful response to the products that we've built.

And we take a lot of care in time and detail, really in sort of this development and concepting phase around little details that create these magical experiences.

So for example, when we turn on Jambox, we have this pretty cool sound design that goes, whoa, and that took months to come up with the right audio tuning.

We work with a lot of different choreographers to create that sound, but every time someone turns it on, I see them smile and they laugh.

There's 1 manufacturer in the world that was able to make the rubber at the quality and durometer that we wanted and the colors that we wanted for the first Jambox, right?

So all of those little magical details, how to resolve, even in software, right?

When we had the first up and when it plugged in and your sleep graph showed up, even just the animations of how, you know, the bars would show up and, and the way the cards would, would flow in and out.

So, a lot of that kind of stuff happens even at this stage, where you sign off on a program, it's going, but you're making those kinds of decisions all the way through, and you're trading them off, and you're doing it in the context of this bigger picture.

So, and continued innovation is an opportunity to keep refining and keep doing all that stuff.

So, so how do we think about it now, you know, kind of at a broader level?

Sort of What is the framework for how we think about these signature experiences?

Well, we do start with these Ys, right, which is that articulation of the problem that we're solving.

And then the themes around how these become actionable concepts, right?

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

How to Design Hardware Products with Hosain Rahman (How to Start a Startup 2014: Lecture 17)