Today was a good day.
I've been working on a big design project for just under one full year. It's a two-part project with a lot of visibility in the company, and involves a change from our current paradigm that falls outside of our "core competence." For the past year, we've gone back and forth on designs and iterations, on concepts and user needs, on market segmentation. The topics are always interesting, and the insight is always good, but month after month, the song remained the same. It was starting to remind me of the Einstein quote about the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
We were struggling.
But two weeks ago, something important happened. We brought in a new industrial designer, one with a totally different paradigm on medical devices than anyone we had on our staff. Almost immediately, he started on one piece of our design problem, and had a working concept in four days.
For anyone that works in design or manufacturing, four days is not a long time. Four days in the entire development lifecycle is a blink of an eye. It takes months, and sometimes years, to take a new product from idea to shelves. For medical devices, time to market is typically even further exaggerated, with regulatory requirements, clinical trials, and extensive documentation standing in the way. It's not uncommon for an implant or heart valve to take more than eight years of development time before seeing commercial use. For a kinesthetic person, it takes an enormous amount of discipline to work on something for that long without seeing the physical output.
The best part, though, was not that we had a design in front of us that met our design criteria, or that changed the way users interacted with IV lines. We had a design that gave us momentum. We got moving on part one of that two part design. And today, that spilled over into part two. I had been searching for a new material since February. I had drowned myself in the research, looked at material properties, made tables of peel / shear / tack values. I had tested for moisture vapor transmission rate and looked at every vendor this side of the Mississippi. But late last week, after seeing Howard's excitement and new designs, I got excited. I picked one. Today, the material arrived, and it works wonderfully. The excitement is contagious. Howard's designs get better with my excitement, and my designs get better with his input.
Momentum is a funny thing. When you get stuck in the inertia of the day-to-day, it's hard to visualize the end of the road (especially when the end of the road is 18 months down the line for a medical device to launch). But as a new friend of mine told me a few weeks ago, the important thing when you're dreaming up something new is not to come up with one really good idea; it's to come up with lots of ideas, period. Ideas lead to more ideas, and more ideas lead to action. And that's all you need to get the ball rolling.
I've been working on a big design project for just under one full year. It's a two-part project with a lot of visibility in the company, and involves a change from our current paradigm that falls outside of our "core competence." For the past year, we've gone back and forth on designs and iterations, on concepts and user needs, on market segmentation. The topics are always interesting, and the insight is always good, but month after month, the song remained the same. It was starting to remind me of the Einstein quote about the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
We were struggling.
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| just get the ball rolling. (photo courtesy of... ) |
For anyone that works in design or manufacturing, four days is not a long time. Four days in the entire development lifecycle is a blink of an eye. It takes months, and sometimes years, to take a new product from idea to shelves. For medical devices, time to market is typically even further exaggerated, with regulatory requirements, clinical trials, and extensive documentation standing in the way. It's not uncommon for an implant or heart valve to take more than eight years of development time before seeing commercial use. For a kinesthetic person, it takes an enormous amount of discipline to work on something for that long without seeing the physical output.
The best part, though, was not that we had a design in front of us that met our design criteria, or that changed the way users interacted with IV lines. We had a design that gave us momentum. We got moving on part one of that two part design. And today, that spilled over into part two. I had been searching for a new material since February. I had drowned myself in the research, looked at material properties, made tables of peel / shear / tack values. I had tested for moisture vapor transmission rate and looked at every vendor this side of the Mississippi. But late last week, after seeing Howard's excitement and new designs, I got excited. I picked one. Today, the material arrived, and it works wonderfully. The excitement is contagious. Howard's designs get better with my excitement, and my designs get better with his input.
Momentum is a funny thing. When you get stuck in the inertia of the day-to-day, it's hard to visualize the end of the road (especially when the end of the road is 18 months down the line for a medical device to launch). But as a new friend of mine told me a few weeks ago, the important thing when you're dreaming up something new is not to come up with one really good idea; it's to come up with lots of ideas, period. Ideas lead to more ideas, and more ideas lead to action. And that's all you need to get the ball rolling.
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