Intro to Product Design | Sean Hsu

Oh, okay.

Okay, everyone, everyone. Sean Xu is a senior engineer at Tesla with over 10 years of design experience. Sean here has brought over 10 products to market and has skills that range from idea generation all the way to production. He's recognized as an industry expert Among top-tier companies from Silicon Valley.

Thank you.

And has received many global awards in design for his brilliance and the quality of his work.

Thank you. Hey guys, I'm Sean. I'm here to just chat about design. Are you guys more— in the phase of having a product already or you guys are in the phase of still coming up with a product? I just want to understand the audience.

50/50.

50/50, okay. Have you guys designed a product or mass-produced a product and delivered to the market yet? No? Maybe? Some? Okay. First I want to share about my journey and talk about method I would typically use and what's design thinking or product design in Silicon Valley kind of style. So I want to start with the first project I built when I was back in college. When I was in the second year of college, it was like 2008, the first robot iRobot was introduced to clean, like vacuum clean the indoor space. So basically what I was thinking was I really want to build a product as cool as iRobot. And it can clean not just surface of the floor but also the water surface. Because I noticed that there are a lot of people have swimming pool in their backyard in United States. So I designed this product. As like from concept, I want to deliver a product that looks like an animal, like a jellyfish, so it looks neat underwater. And in that era, it was also when James Dyson started to deliver like vacuum machines that looks very cool with a lot of technology element in it. So in my design, I also tried to like get A lot of very fancy curves like this. It looks like a jellyfish and transparent with a lot of cool color, like very James Dyson-like. Here's another color I set up here. So it was a very unique design at that point. So the product looks great. The function is very outstanding. We actually clean water surface very efficiently. But at the same time we are selling $1,500 to $2,000 as a hope as we could become this new category as Apple to sell premium and then success in this market. And after the first 18 months it was a total failure as my first startup because as a designer or an engineer I typically, we typically get trained to think about product first. So what I did was I spent time on literally in my garage to just build this product from prototype, from concept. There wasn't 3D print technology back then. It was almost 9, 10 years ago. So all I can do is hire someone from a factory, produce a very expensive prototype for me with their huge, very, very huge 3D printing machine. And so we were starting from the technology design and tried to find a market. And I found out it was not easy. Until 2010, there was a Gulf of Mexico oil spill from BP. I don't know if you guys remember that. It was like 7 years ago.

Yeah.

So I actually tweaked the design to not only collect trash from water surface but also collect oil from this tunnel or like a chamber. So this chamber can actually filter oil, not just trash. So having this design change is, I would say, merely 0.1% of design change, but the whole market is different. It's a way bigger market, way bigger traction. We actually ended up winning Red Dot Design Award and All other 20 entrepreneurship award, business case award, or like any startup-related award. And it ended up just by award itself we earned more than $200,000 by cash. And then we found a company with that, with some investors. And it was a big traction. We get on global news. We get on like local news in Taiwan and China. We get on a lot of storytelling channels and then people get notice what's going on here. They actually end up— we actually end up finding an NPO back in Taiwan, they want to acquire this technology and we sold the technology when I was 21 years old and I sold the technology because I know it's a good exit and I also know I have no clue how to mass produce this product. So So then that's why I moved to the US and do a lot of— at Tesla I do product design, I do battery design and manufacturing. So a lot of our work is to make sure whatever product we are designing is scalable in the sense of not serving a local business, local market, but also serving a global market as our manufacturing lines are pushing products like every 10, 20 seconds, that kind of speed. So you can imagine how we scale it from there. So this is probably the only slide I want to talk about today as my experience on how I start with a product, but it's very hard to find the market. So today I want to more focus on product market fit kind of design method. And there are other things that you guys can check on my website if you are interested. So it's shuangxi.com. And my— My email should be here, so it's hello@xiongshi.com. So if you guys have any questions, just feel free to email me. It's right here, xiongshi.com. So I just want to show a little bit more about what I've designed, so if you guys have questions, I can answer it. This is a sensor for logistics. If you are shipping TVs, like these kind of TVs on Amazon, This sensor can protect you to tell you when did the product been mishandled during the shipping process. And we also get a lot of awards on this and some traction. Big check from MIT. But I don't want to spend time there today. And other products are like— Wearable devices. So I designed a smartwatch for kids. And it was 3 years ago. So we actually shipped this product to Spain and Russia. And actually it's coming out from also UK and United States as well. And medical devices, manufacturing stuff for Tesla. One of the things besides the product, Powerwalls and other products, one of the things that we built is also the manufacturing lines that get on TVs. So this is one of the video calls before the flood. And the whole manufacturing line back there was myself and another engineer to design the process and design the robots there. So a lot of involvement on robotics. But this is just some basic of my background if you guys are interested. So—