Next generation design architecture

I recently stumbled upon an interesting (older) interview from Connected Magazine. The author, Alan McCluskey, interviewed Ron Sanchez (who at the time was Professor of Strategy and Technology management at IMD - International Institute for Management Development - Lausanne). Read through the interview here: Modularity: upgrading to the next generation design architecture for an interesting take on what Modularity is and where it is leading product design.

Party answers

When you hear the word modularity, what do you think about? What image do you form in your mind? Perhaps you think of modular homes, or modular furniture, or perhaps you are a Modular Management Consultant and think about an abstract unit containing a discrete functionality and well-defined interfaces. I would guess that the latter thought isn’t the first on most peoples’ minds though. It certainly isn’t the phrase that comes out of my mouth when someone asks me, in a social setting, what I do for a living. I have to be honest and say that despite the fact that I have been involved with Modular Management for two years now, I still don’t have a good party answer to what it is I do for a living.

What we do as Modular Management Consultants is fairly complex to explain to a layman. When someone asks me what I do, I respond with “I am a consultant.” I’ve found that maybe 10% of the time this answer is sufficient, but most of the time people ask me “so what does that mean?” in some shape or form. My standard add-on information is that we are management and engineering consultants, and that we help companies with their product structures. This response is sufficient for most people with just a casual interest, people who were only trying to make small talk, or just trying to be polite. They still have no idea what I do, but they don’t feel like probing anymore. I’m pretty good about gauging other peoples’ interest levels. I don’t offer much more detail if I am sitting in the dentist’s office, or at a hair salon, but if I am with a group of techies I might just offer the whole load of information without being prompted.

There are a few people in my world who have demanded more information, and in those cases I will typically explain the concepts with a product example they can relate to. I might use the automotive industry and the idea of common platforms as a springboard, or I might use popular brands of power tools to exemplify the ideas. I’ll point out things that are common units, modules that can be used across an entire product platform to capitalize on economies of scale. Of course there is much more to assisting clients as they develop modular architectures for their products, but by boiling it down to outputs most people can understand what our clients are trying to achieve.

I’m fairly used to having party answers to what it is I do for a living. My post-graduate work history involves being a designer engineer, a systems engineer, a product manager, and now a consultant. Most people probed for more information when I responded with any of the occupations I listed above. Sometimes I think my police officer friend has it right when she just lies to those interested only in small talk, since she absolutely hates the questions that follow (have you ever shot anyone? being particularly annoying I’m sure). What is your party answer to what you do for a living?

Toying with lead

Unless you’ve been living under a rock this summer you have heard about the many recalls involving toys made in China. It first appeared on my radar screen with the Thomas the Train lead paint recalls. We had a brief moment of panic in our household when it looked like James was going to have to leave our station, but thankfully our James is older and wasn’t affected by the recall. When I fished James from the train table drawer my four year old heavily questioned what I was doing with James. I gave him a sketchy explanation, and saw the look of terror on his face when I said James might need to leave our house for a while. He was ultimately relieved when I determined that the serial number on our James indicated that he was safe to continue residing in our train table drawer. Soon after the great James Scare (as it is now referred to in our household) we caught wind of a Mattel recall that had the potential to affect more toys in our house. Again we were lucky and our vast array of Diego toys was spared the fate of being shipped back to the manufacturer. However, recently we finally had to remove a lead-laden toy from the toy box. Sarge from the Disney Pixar Cars movie is still sitting in a kitchen drawer waiting for the postage paid envelope to take him back to Mattel.

I am not trying to make light of the seriousness of lead paint in children’s toys, but it isn’t something I lose sleep over at night. Thankfully Sarge was a rather recent addition to my four-year-old’s collection of cars, and he wasn’t played with all that much. I don’t feel the need to make my kids endure lead tests because for the most part they are past the putting toys in their mouths phase of childhood. I do have many friends who are losing sleep over the recent lead paint issues though. I’ve heard a few friends say things like “I don’t want to buy any toys that are made in China anymore.” As evident from articles like this, I would guess that my friends aren’t alone. Mattel is certainly aware of the public relations problems it faces as we move closer to the holiday toy buying season.

I won’t pretend to have the solution to this quagmire, although I will say that I cringe every time it is implied that if we simply add more government regulators we can solve problems like these. The problem with inspectors is that the more you have the fewer problems they catch…certainly the tenth inspector is well assured that the nine before him or her already caught any problems. The problems need to be fixed in design and within the manufacturers’ supply chains before they ever reach an inspection point. Obviously the lure to manufacture in a low cost country like China is strong and necessary for many low-margin high-volume retail producers. So how do they prevent problems like these from happening again? Please let us know what you think.

Other people care about this too

I found the following post on another blog, which I thought was a good reference point. It turns out that other people are talking about modularity as well. Check it out if you have a moment: Simplify your product design.

A Modularity Case Study

If you are still checking in here I commend you. I have good intentions of updating this blog more frequently than I have been, so please bear with me. My first two posts have dealt with product complexity, and I have alluded to tools that are available to circumvent some of the pitfalls of offering too many products to the market. Rather than rehash it here, I thought it would be worthwhile to link to a case example on the Society of Manufacturing Engineers' website. Modularizing the design of electronic controls.

Feature Creep

Thanks to one of the readers of this new blog I was alerted to an article on the Financial Page of The New Yorker. It addresses the topic I wrote about last week with a slightly different spin. I am not going to dive much further into the topic, but I thought it might be interesting for you to read about the idea from a more mainstream source.

I will say that the article ends with the premise that "there is no easy solution to this," which may be true, but it isn't as cut and dried as it is presented. From the last paragraph of the article I linked to above:

You can try to make simplicity into a selling point, as Philips has done with
its Sense and Simplicity campaign, or as Apple has done with the iPod. You can
stratify the market, creating different products for different skill levels (as
in the market for computer printers), although that may leave consumers
bewildered at the sheer number of choices. In theory, the best strategy would be
to make the complex simple, packaging all the power and the options consumers
think they want into a design that they’ll find easy to use.

What is missing above is a sort of happy medium. You need to think through your company strategy to determine where you want your products to fall in the market. It may be that you decide to go with a simple approach, a many products approach, or the one size fits all approach, the key is that you've evaluated the risks and benefits of each tactic. You need to spend time evaluating what your customers are basing their buying decisions on, and also how they are using the products after they leave the store. You need to find the balance between offering enough features to move your products off of the shelf, but not too many that they overwhelm your customers. A strong, well thought through product architecture can deliver the answers for your business, and can guide you to the right mix of products to satisfy your customers' needs. Only the lucky few companies stumble upon the right strategy on the first try, using a methodical approach (to create a modular structure) to define your product structure can take you much further than luck can though. Feature Creep is not a problem you have to just accept as a law of nature, it is possible to control your own destiny in regards to product complexity.

Simply too complex

I came across this article on thehttp://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/ site recently: The Upgraded Digital Divide: Are We Developing New Technologies Faster than Consumers Can Use Them? I thought the article made some very good points. It made me think about the newest technological product to make its way into my life. My brother gave me a cute little magenta iPod Shuffle for my birthday. I waited a few weeks to even open the package, not because I didn’t want to test it out, but because I was delaying the learning I would need to do to make it function. I’m not even new to MP3 players, but this is my first iPod and I wasn’t sure what to expect. My old MP3 player has had the same mix of music on it since I trained for my first marathon in 2001. For a variety of reasons it was difficult to use, so I just kept the same music on it. Yes, I realize that defeats a main purpose of an MP3 player. In contrast, the iPod shuffle is incredibly easy to use. I’d been somewhat reluctant to download iTunes, but after I did I quickly became a convert. Going back to that old MP3 player seems impossible to me now.

The Shuffle is very easy to use both in adding music and in operation. There are few choices necessary while operating it. I find that to be refreshing. I might have an engineering degree but that doesn’t mean I like flipping through a host of menus just so I can listen to music while I run. Of course the Shuffle is a “low-cost” iPod, but honestly I don’t need the extra features of any of the other models. I am content with the “low end” product, because for me it is anything but “low end.” I value the simplicity, and the teeny tiny size.

I am by no means saying that my love for the Shuffle means that the other iPods don’t have their own market niches. Obviously Apple has done a good job of developing different product variants to meet the needs of a variety of market segments. My brother, who gave me the Shuffle, is a video iPod guy. My husband keeps looking at my iPod and telling me that his Rio MP3 player with the added functionality of a radio and the ease of upgrading memory of simply buying a new SD card is still superior. We are all in different customer segments. This fact is not lost on Apple. I have not worked with Apple, but a quick scan of the available iPods tells me that each iPod has a different target audience.

It is easy to say that customers value simplicity, as the article suggests, but the truth is that not all customers value simplicity over technological features. There will always be a segment of early adopters that strive to have the latest and greatest, and want to be the envy of all of their techie friends. There will always be people in the middle who value features, but don’t want anything overly complicated. Of course there will also be the simpletons, like myself. Suddenly providing simplicity to your customers seems very complicated doesn’t it? Not only do you need to provide a product version that has the latest and greatest gadgets, but you need to provide a model that is easy to use as well. It doesn’t have to be complicated though. If you have a good handle on your target customer segments, you can develop a comprehensive product architecture that is able to manage and deliver the most technologically advanced product variant as well as the simplest one. There are certainly many tools available to help you accomplish this goal; you just need to keep in mind that it all starts with your customers. It is not simply a case of: If you build it they will come, successful companies dig much deeper than that.