Planning And Managing Product Engineering with Orlin Wetzker

Protect your brand, product or invention from the hazards of consumer product launching and go from idea to product to big brand. With guidance from retail product design and development experts Tracy and Tom Hazard. Get the insider secrets to put the right things in the right order with the right resources so you can out design, outsource, and out profit your way to retail success.

Hey, product launchers. Welcome back to Product Launch Hazards. This is Tracy Hazzard, and I'm bringing you Tom Hazard today. So Tom's joining me for an interview with Orlin Wetzker. Orlin is from Transcend Innovations out of Salt Lake City, Utah, and I got to meet him a few months ago at an event, and he has a really interesting business because it's completely focused on sort of tech engineering, advanced engineering, and all of those things where you start to integrate circuit boards and all the things Tom and I don't do. So it's fascinating to us, but he gets involved really early on in the product development process and starts to assess the product development system and making sure that companies like Intel, Boeing, Roche, P and G and Lilly have the right mix of technology and development services so that they're pulling this together. And he focuses on implementing product management systems to improve time to market, increase product completion predictability so that his clients really pay out. Because we all know about scope creep and. And we all know about time creep when we're trying to work with consultants. And he's really dialed it in. He has 25 years of experience improving business processes and developing new products, and he really understands the keys to successful product launches. So I'm so excited to bring you Orlan.

Hey, Orlin, thanks so much for joining us.

Oh, thank you for inviting me on.

We don't often get to talk to someone with as deep experience as you have in. I'm going to say it on more of the engineering side of things, but more of also the tech product side of things. So I'm excited to have you here for our audience.

Yeah, it's a great space to be in the technology space. It's growing so rapidly. I really enjoy the challenges that are associated with that.

We're so used to having companies in the US Today develop tech by coming up with ideas and throwing them over the fence to a factory in Asia and having them develop it for them. I'm working, so happy to talk with you a company here in the US that develops these things, because I think that that's been happening less and less.

Yeah, well, we actually get a fair amount of people who come to us who've already done that route of trying to go overseas, having a lot of trouble, especially with the communication and the time barriers that come up with that. It really helps them to have somebody who they feel like they can more intimately talk about what they want and how they want to get that.

So, yeah, I think there's like a lack of, I'm not going to call it innovation understanding, because that's not exactly what I mean. It's more of a. The language that you use if you're not in the industry, if you're not an engineer, if you're not a designer and you don't know the language to use, it's really hard to get the factory to accomplish what you want to accomplish when you're talking about it in layman's terms.

Yeah, I think that's part of it. The language barrier certainly is a problem just in people finding a place like me to go to. And sometimes it's a problem for me to describe what it is that we do. The gadgets that we know and love, our cell phones, our Bluetooth speakers, anything that has a power button. The amount of technology and engineering that's associated with pulling that together is beyond most of the population. And so they don't even know what to ask for when it comes to ideas about what they can do.

And I think that there's a lot of this. That's what Tom and I have found is when you don't do something again and again and it's not in your wheelhouse to be doing it, which is one of the reasons we don't do. We personally don't do a lot of tech products. We do tech adjacent products. There are power buttons involved, but the technology part is usually known. It's the rest of it that we're designing. And because there are so many things that can go wrong and things that you will have learned from projects over time.

Oh yeah, I was thinking, one of the things that I get a lot is can I do this? And I always answer, I mean, no matter how crazy it is, I say yes, we can do that because there's so much technology that's available. And what we can do is almost limitless at this point. It really is bounded by imagination. And that's also a hard thing for people to grasp, is just how vast what we can accomplish really is.

Then the question becomes, should you do it? Yeah, obviously I've had long conversations about that.

Obviously that comes into play, but I don't know how much that's really an issue as we go through.

So let's talk about some kind of projects, some examples of some that you've worked on, because I'm really curious.

One of the main projects that we're just getting out, it's just getting into production right now is a moisture sensor. It's a simple sensor that is used to go into the ground and it will tell you how much moisture you have, and then it will relay that information to a base station and then send that up to the Internet, to the cloud. And that's being used by small farmers so that they can make sure that their crops are actually going to get the highest production yield that they can get.

Wow. Our farming is getting very high tech.

Yeah. It makes so much sense because it affects the quality of the produce that comes out and it also affects how much water they use, so they can reduce the amount of water that they're using and still get the optimal crops that they need. And so that was really why the people who came to us, why they wanted to get into this business, is to help conserve water and also to maximize food production.

I think we need this invention in Los Angeles. Tracy, you know, every time it rains and all the sprinklers are going off in the public areas, it's like if they had this water sensor, it would tell the system, it's raining. Don't water me now. That would be so helpful.

My personal favorite is when they start to flash on the electronic billboards, turn your sprinklers off. I'm like, people aren't going to go out in the rain. It finally rained in California. But people aren't going to go out and turn their sensors, turn their sprinklers off. It just doesn't happen. So, yeah, we definitely need technology to kick in and do it for us.

I can't divulge anything more than that, but something's coming, something.

So.

You know, let's talk about the challenges of sometimes these projects that you're getting. So someone comes in with an idea, but it's challenging to plan and quote these projects. And I think that's probably the biggest barrier sometimes to innovators getting their ideas to market and you personally being able to manage the expectations of what this needs.

It's one of those things. The technology life cycle is a little bit different than more of what I'd call a mechanical or industrial design product. Just in the fact that on the mechanical process, you can get a prototype relatively quickly out, and then you work a lot to get it into production. And it's almost the Opposite for us, we have to spend a lot of time getting through the prototyping process and then once we're done, we've almost completed what's needed to get into production. So the life cycles are a little bit swapped in terms of that. There still is production work, but we don't have long tooling cycles or anything like that. And then the other thing is it's less about what it looks like and more about how it functions. We end up doing a lot of programming as well as working with the actual electrical components. And so we'll have a bill of materials that will have hundreds of items on that. And it's a whole bunch of little resistors and everything else that has to go through.

And your diagram and all of those things. Yeah, I mean, that really is great. I mean, I think for hard goods like what Tom and I do, 3D printing has helped change that because now we can just send it and say this is what it needs to look like. There's still tooling, but at least there's a lot more of clearly not just a functional prototype, but an aesthetic one as well.

Right. We end up, a lot of things just end up in basically a plastic box and that's what it ends up being. Sometimes if it's more of a consumer type product, you have to put a little more effort into what that plastic box is going to look like. But in the end, it's still the plastic.

You have the challenges of thinking through the process of how things are working, how they're functioning, all the things that can go wrong that will affect it. That's a lot of unknowns in the process.

Yeah, we have to map out the interfaces and we spend a lot of time up front just dealing with requirements. We'll figure out what's the environment it needs to work in, who's going to interface with it and that who may be a person or it may be in another machine. Like when we're talking with the cloud, we're negotiating with the cellular carrier and making sure that we can connect all of those little things. They all have to work seamlessly and they have to do it time and time again. So we spend a lot of time on getting those things right.

I imagine you also spend a lot of time with people like, well, how much is this going to cost? And they just want something to be like simple and flowery. How long is it going take? Is probably the next question after that.

Yes. And how much is it going to cost is usually the biggest issue that people go through. Technology Development isn't cheap. We have electrical engineers that really know their stuff. They have to get paid and I need a full team to make that happen. So the prices just have to fall in line with that. Fortunately, the returns on your product typically end up compensating fairly well for that. One of the big things is a step up in volume usually can warrant the cost that it takes to do the design.

What does that mean, a step up in volume?

So let's say you have a product and your manufacturing costs are. Let's say it's $100 and you're going from a volume of maybe a couple hundred to start with to 2 or 3,000. Now all of a sudden, if you look at the added cost to reduce the price of the product, let's say with a redesign, we can get a $10 reduction in the over bill of materials costs. Overall bill of materials cost. That would more than pay for the engineering that you're going to put into it. So you have to play those games as well, understanding volumes, understanding what the product cost looks like. But usually more engineering can result in the lower product cost. And that's normally where people end up with going through that value add.

Engineering is what we used to call it.

And we normally go through a strategy of stepping people into a product. So what I mean by that is we can start off with off the shelf components and just kind of piece it all together. It would be maybe bigger than you'd like it to be in your final form factor, but it ends up providing all the function that you need. And then as you can demonstrate that you can sell the product and it actually has legs, then when it starts, you start jumping into a new product quantity. You're selling at a higher volume. Now you can go in and do the engineering to customize it, reduce the size and reduce the overbill of materials cost. So anyway, you have to take those kind of strategies with technology, especially if you're going into a market, you're not quite sure if the product's going to.

Make it or not, that's really a risky proposition. I bet for a lot of companies though, I mean, they have to do all this development in order to make the product they want. And if they're not sure it's going to be successful, that's a big bet.

Well, it's always the bet with new product development when you're going into it. And we always advise that you go through some good market analysis before you get to the stage where you're spending money on the product. But there's some products where you just need to put the development dollars in to get the technology to where it's at so that people even know if that's something that they want. So, once again, it's always the trade off, always the risk that you're going through with these type of products.

What do you wish that some of the people come to you and knew beforehand?

Usually what I want them to know before they talk to me is that they have at least an inkling of a market that they're going into that somebody wants what it is that they think they want to deliver.

Now, you're speaking to the fire here, because that's what I say all the time.

Yeah, that by far is the one thing I always ask first. And I have the most people who they just tell me, oh, this is the greatest thing. Everybody's going to want it. And when I hear everybody's going to want it, I just come back and say, well, I don't believe that you've done any market research on what you're doing.

It's like the people who have a business plan and say, oh, there's a $5 billion market for this and I'm coming into it and if I can just get 1%, then I'm golden. And that they think just based on that logic and no actual proof they've got a winning process or company and.

It just is not the case or that it's fundable. That's the one we hear all the time, too. So, yeah, no, that's such a good point. And that's a little bit of why we stayed away from doing these types of technology products, because it's more risky in terms of how much effort and time you have to put into it before you can find that answer sometimes in particular markets or it's more challenging to try to get the answers from the marketplace. Do you really need this? And so you have to rely on research reports and surveys and things like that. And I'm a bigger fan of let's sell them something and get them to convert it into dollars. So I am a really big fan of finding something that may exist. And so if you're going to replace, in your case, like you were mentioning, a water conservation product, but if there's any kind of, I'm going to call them automated sprinklers or something like that, where they have some kind of sensor, where it's obviously someone who's putting in a sprinkler because they don't want water to be going Constantly. They don't want to go out and turn it on and off and doing all that, even if it's not as good as what you imagined. Just being selling that and having the clients from that or the customers from that gets you access to the right people to start to talk to. That's what I'm a fan of. So we try to get them into a product that exists first. If it's not possible to know, if you had to go full tooling, full engineering, full all of that, sell something to the right type of people and make sure that you can have a conversation with them.

And like I say, I also advise the same thing. Let's understand that there's really a market before we get into that, because if you're coming to me, you need to be ready to pay the bills that are coming. And that's just the reality of where we're at.

Yeah. So some of the challenges to timing though, because market shifts are happening so fast, technology is changing fast. Do you advise clients and people to put in, I'm going to call it maintenance programs in ongoing development beyond, you know, hey, we've launched this thing.

Well, sometimes I get into that, sometimes I'll talk about product roadmaps as we start working with customers so that we can understand how we're going to develop it. Because almost invariably when we start working with a product, what they'll want the product to be and what they'll want to pay and what it takes in terms of time to get that there, they don't align. And so we have to make decisions and trade offs as we go through that. So they'll often be a. Okay, well we're going to start with this version and then we'll just add these in the next revision that we go through. So almost always once you get into technology products, you're talking about roadmaps and when and how you deploy features and how you manage your overall development budget as you go through it and product.

Improvements and value add and all of those great things.

Right. It's all a part of it. And so it ends up being a long road. In some ways. We're kind of mixing what you'd expect from a software development cycle with traditional hardware development. And they both come together and they both play a part of the overall design process.

Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. And you were mentioning before about you have a deep knowledge in all the off the shelf parts that you could be bringing in and ways that, which you could help them phase. I mean, this is really where this is not something you should be doing yourself. You should be ad hocking. You should have a professional in your corner. And I'm a big proponent of that because there's a lot of things I bet that can go wrong and we see it all the time. Bad development that results in products that light on fire. Personally, we've had the personal experience.

Well, yeah, but I bet you also, whenever you saw something in the news about a hoverboard blowing up, you probably were like, yeah, they didn't develop that.

Yeah, well, one of the things my team is really good at, and you may not consider this much of a skill, but they know really how to search for parts and how to find really weird stuff. There are millions and millions of electrical components out there and they change every day and there's always something new. And these guys, they spend a lot of time just kind of knowing how to search, knowing where to search, knowing and keeping abreast of new technology. So it's a constant part of what we do. And if you're a novice and you don't have any experience with that, this could be a very tough thing to work through. And just knowing how to put the pieces together is a very important skill.

You know, you're pointing out something. So I read Steve Wozniak's biography a little while ago because I was writing an article about him and I had done an interview with him. It's called iwas. And in it he was mentioning that how he was really well connected to the community of who was developing new circuit boards and all sorts of new things that were going on. And that's how he got involved with creating. At that time it was CD ROM drives and things like that. And that were revolutionary on the early Macs. And he couldn't have done that if he wasn't so deeply connected and didn't understand that this was a leap of innovation from what had been done before. And there was no Internet then. So he was doing it the old fashioned way, like going through catalogs and talking to sales reps. And so it is a skill set. So you have a great team who's got a good skill.

Yeah, so it's an odd personality type that gets involved with this. We use Slack for our communication here and we have what we call a random channel. And it's really interesting to see what they post on our random channel of.

Slack, probably like watching Reddit, all sorts of weird stuff.

They just posted the one with the test that somebody conducted, the fake study of whether or not parachutes are effective. And the randomized study for that, they really got a kick out of that. It's really interesting. And a whole bunch of bizarre stuff. And we get postings basically all hours of the day of these guys as they're going through that.

It's their own creative outlet there. I love it.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Well, we like to talk about the things that do go wrong here because we're all about product launch hazards. So you learn a lot from the mistakes that go on and happen. And I'm sure you've had clients who made a lot of mistakes and then came to you to fix, to pick up the pieces and. Or mistakes that you made early on. And I would love for you to highlight some of those because we learn a lot from that.

So I've had a couple people come to me who have products that they had designed by other people. They'll bring the hardware into us and we'll be like, we need the design files in order to do anything. Otherwise we're starting from scratch. It would be like somebody bringing a drone to you and saying, here, will you do the. Will you fix my design? And you're like, well, I'm going to have to do all the cad, because there's no CAD drawing. So we've had a couple people who've done that. And so the client should really own a copy of their design files. Once they've had something design, they shouldn't leave it up to somebody. One of the people, they couldn't get the files because the person who was their engineer got Parkinson's disease and they couldn't get anything from that person. And so we had to start from scratch, literally on that design.

That's a costly problem. But that's so true. We get clients where we provide them files. We put them in a Dropbox link or something like that, where we always give them to our clients, whether they ask for them or not. But I find so few of them actually ever access them and download it. When I look at the log, I'm like, you guys should be keeping this local.

Yeah, I've seen that happen quite a bit. I think the other thing is just underestimating just how many details need to be worked through. And for technology products, you have to consider product certification as a part of the process that you go through. And that often gets overlooked, what that goes through. And it applies to so many different product categories and regulatory testing that you have to do. For electronics in the U.S. we have to go through an FCC certification, the Federal Communication Commission, and that's for all electronics because all electronics emit radio waves of some type, whether or not they intend to or not. And you have to be clear that you aren't doing that.

Do you have to go through UL listing? If the part that you buy. So let's say you buy the cord, the power cord, it's UL listed. Do you have to go through that separately with all the things combined together or does each one count individually?

Yeah. So I just want to point out that FCC and UL are different certifications.

Yes, thank you for saying that, clarifying that.

Yeah. So UL is about safety. And whether or not you need UL certification really depends on who you're selling to and how you intend to sell it. And so you have to understand that. You have to understand who's buying and what they want. And there's different types of safety certification that you can go through. There's actually four in the US and then you have a different safety certification for every country throughout the world. So anyway, there's different regulations that you have to follow. The way I look at it is the easiest safety certification to go through is what they call a low voltage certification, where essentially the voltage of the device is under 40 volts is what they look at. And if it's below an even lower threshold, they don't even say that you need safety certification. But if you're plugging into a wall and that AC is going directly into your unit, then typically you will need to get safety certification as part of what you're doing.

And the time it takes to get the certifications and things go wrong and you have to then make some adjustments and resubmit. We've seen that happen again and again with many of our clients. That's something that is probably the biggest error that is made in the planning cycle for these. Most companies, they're like, the development will be done on this date. We can go to market by this date. And not considering the time it takes to get through all of that and maybe some redesign that has to happen.

The other certification that comes into play is actually if you're using cellular in your product, you have a cellular modem built into your product. You have to go through a carrier certification. So not only do you have to get the product through FCC, but you have to then go to your AT&T or Verizon or T Mobile or whatever care you expect or want to use, and you have to get them to certify that you can use that product on their network. And really on the technology side, that's becoming a much more attractive proposition than it has been in the past. We're seeing that the cost of modules is really plummeting. And so it's really making it to where you can afford to put a cellular modem in your product and have it connect directly through the carrier to the Internet and get rid of gateway devices entirely.

Ah, interesting. See, you're always looking for faster shortcuts to making things run smoother, more directly, less places to pass through. I love that. Less go wrong. Right.

We're always challenged in this market with cost, with product cost. And so the new devices, the new components that come out, they're almost always geared towards dropping the overall cost of the product. And so that's why you have to stay current with your product. And that's why product design is always a factor, because you can start shaving big dollars off this. Just so you can understand the magnitude of this, we're seeing retail prices on these cellular modules drop from just under $100 to sub 30. And we're seeing trends which are getting them into the sub$15 range.

Why is it always such a race to the bottom with technology part costs? I mean, at some point, it seems is just because so many other manufacturers can make it that it becomes commodity.

No, it's really volumes. As the volumes kick up the prices. Just when you get something to silicon, when it's actually a chip that they're making, all of the expenses in the development of that first chip, everything else from there, the actual cost to create a little chip, is fractions of a penny. It's just so low for them to make them. So they're just amortizing their development costs over a larger and larger spread. And almost always they make their money in the first off the first batch and then everything else. It's really just what the market will bear in terms of the cost for that.

Orland, tell us a little bit. You're out of Salt Lake City, and how is that region, I mean, is there getting a lot more technology, a lot more things going on than when you first started there?

So we know that there's a big tech boom that's happening in the Salt Lake area. Further south from us is what they officially call silicon slopes. And you're seeing a lot of the software startups that are out there. There's not quite as much in the hardware space, but everywhere there's software. And everywhere where you have an instance where somebody's developing a SaaS, a software as a service application, they end up at some point needing A physical device. And so you see that a little bit. But I think even more than that, it's a very entrepreneur friendly environment. There's a lot of both state and local organizations which are really helping the entrepreneurial community. And so we're seeing the effects of that. So it is still a very positive environment for growth and for technology.

Oh, well, it sounds wonderful. I've enjoyed my visits there and getting to meet you and your lovely wife. And you're right, I think the community is getting a lot more entrepreneurial support, which is making a big difference.

I think the one thing which we see a little bit of but could probably be better is just investor support. So there are a lot of investor networks, but we just can't hold a candle to the amount of money that's in the Bay Area or other places. So we still need a little more support in that area. But by and large it's really a good place for a business like mine to kind of sit around and take advantage of the market.

Well, Orlan, I so appreciate you coming on. Is there anything else you want to share with our audience or with us?

Well, one of the trends I did talk about is the advent of these new cellular, of these cheaper cellular modules. And that's a pretty dramatic change in the market. And we've got a number of projects which are using that. And we've actually come up with our own cellular module card which we can put into projects to really help in that area. So we are pushing really, really strongly. The other thing that we're pushing for in terms of our overall market approach is really to focus on natural resource management. It's been something that we've decided we've had a lot of demand in that area and things like water conservation and energy production. And so we're looking for projects that are in those areas to, to really advance that. We see it's certainly a need and it's something that we have a lot of interest and experience.

This is where I think that if I can highlight anything about what you've been sharing and our conversations that we had before is that when you get someone who has deep experience in a particular area or has a lot of learnings from multiple projects that they've done, such as in the natural resource world, that translates into making your project and your product go faster because they're leveraging that on your behalf. It's not something new every single time. And that's really great for you to share that with us so that our audience knows because if they're working on those kinds of projects, there can be an economy of scale with going with you because you're working on multiple projects in that world.

Absolutely. We're very focused on driving the overall value proposition for our customers. I take a really strong partnering approach with everybody I talk to. I'm always straight with with them from the start. I'm not interested in selling them something they don't need. And so it's one of those things that I just feel makes the whole experience better when you can go into something knowing that everybody's on the same page as far as the overall success of the product that is being built.

Yeah. When your whole team is so excited it came to market and everybody involved is excited about that, that does make for a much better project.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Well, Orlin, thank you so much for coming and joining us today.

Thank you so much for having me. This has been a wonderful experience. Yeah, thanks.

Great pleasure to finally get to meet you myself. I know you and Tracy have had some past experiences meeting each other and having some great talks, so it's great to participate a little bit and look forward to that more in the future.

Yeah, me too.

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