EPISODE 15 - LARRY KALLIO

Welcome to the Impulse Spotlight where we meet with product development professionals and shine a light on the products they are most proud of.

In this episode we meet with the Vice President of Product Development at MillerKnoll, a company that specializes in workplace furniture. Our guest is an avid game player spending his free time honing his skills in activities like volleyball, tennis, cornhole and darts. He also enjoys spending time with his wife and two daughters. 

Larry Kallio was born and raised in Lansing, Michigan. He went on to study Math and Statistics at Grand Valley State University, initially aspiring to be a high school math teacher and swimming coach. After college, Larry's career took a different turn, landing a part-time job at Steelcase, which soon evolved into a full-time role in office furniture custom development.

In 1999, after 5 years at Steelcase, Larry joined Herman Miller, now MillerKnoll, as a development engineer. Over the past 24 years he has made significant contributions to the company, leading product development and customization efforts.

Today we'll be diving into some of Larry's most notable work, specifically the development of the Renewed Height Adjustable Table. We'll explore the development process, from the initial timeline and team involvement to the key milestones and the prototyping process. Larry shares insights into the use of diecast parts for testing and the challenges faced with making world class furniture. Additionally he'll offer valuable advice for those looking to make a significant impact in the product development industry.

Join us as we learn from Larry's wealth of experience and gain a deeper understanding of the art and science of product development.

Show Notes:

Click here to learn more about Miller Knoll.

Podcast Transcript:

Hey, Larry, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, I am glad you are here. So I started Impulse a little over 25 years ago. I worked for a product development company before that. I tell everybody I got my master's degree doing that. And then started impulse and have been designing products for companies since. How did you get into product development ?

I would say the back door for the most part, I I really started my college career in the 90 s, mid ninetys thinking I was going to be a math teacher and a so coach. And I kind of got towards the tail end of that and I had a buddy that worked at Steelcase, which is another office furniture manufacturer here in West Michigan offered me kind of a part time job to come hang out with them to finish out my last semester and I am like, you know, this seems kind of fun. So I will just I can always go back and get certified to teach. So I am going to try this for a while and see what happens. So I just took my math degree with an emphasis in statistics and then started doing custom solutions work for divisions of steel case. That I was unable to turn into being a new product development mechanical engineer here at Herman Miller back in the day and my journey, which maybe we will talk about a bit more later, has brought me here to help lead product development efforts and it is been 24 years now now. Miller Knoll.

That is crazy. 1 story I am interested to hear a little more about that. So what is your current role and and what kinds of products do you develop?

Yeah. So here Miller is actually the bringing together Herman Miller and no. So 2 very close competitors within the contract furniture industry and also both have a good presence within the retail market for contemporary home furnishings. So it made sense to bring the 2 companies together. I remember being on a call with our CEO and she was kind of core when she said during the pandemic, you know, never really let a crisis pass you by, right? Like, you mean something, but I do not know what. So I woke up 1 day and all of a sudden Herm Miller had bought its closest competitor, Knowle. And we have been bringing these 2 companies together ever since. So right now, we kind of break up our product development effort into 3 different categories. 1 of them is called Lifestyle. Which does more than home furnishings, lobby like furniture, the couches, the coffee tables, the you know, some some folks might call it ancillary furniture. We have a seating category which does a lot of our high performance task seating. So if you think of I mean, Herman Miller used to be known as the Air On Chair Company. So it is a it is so our high end task seating is where we spend a lot of our investment dollars from research and so on and so forth. So that is an isolated team and then I get to help with everything else. So I really the workplace product development category. And then in that, I also have the team around the world that does the customizations of that for our clients to a big part of the contract furniture industry is not only, you know, looking at a catalog and buying items, but then saying, well, I am, but I want it to do this. Can you make it do that? So about 20 % of our overall market is custom.

Okay. So when you say is it contract manufacturing, contract furniture is that does that mean custom?

That is it means commercial probably right. So if you think of a retail versus commercial right in our contract market, we set up contracts with commercial companies to sell them the sea of desks they are going to need for all their folks in their facility and their conference rooms and their board rooms and then residential being more that the couches and the coffee tables I mentioned.

Yeah, yeah, okay. That makes sense. So tell us about the product that you want to talk about today.

The renewed table is really kind of what I want to talk about today. It was we really started development of it back in 2012 and it was really when I was starting to come of age as a product lead versus a product development engineer. So I would kind of dabbled a little bit and leading a few smaller product development initiatives, had 1 good table product development under my belt with the Everywhere table, so and was ready to from an overall project. Leadership and category leadership kind of tackle the next thing. And the next thing was the renew height adjustable table. So for Herman Miller back then, it was really our first true broad standard line getting into the height adjustable table market.

Okay, uh, tell us a little bit more about it, like what are some of the key features or maybe things we would not know about it just by looking at it online or even.

Yeah, yeah. If you go on the website and you look at the renew table, you would look at it and be like, yeah, it is a good looking and high addressable table. I have seen a million of them and it is not you know, I kind of always said if you had everybody. Line up their tables and put someone on a skateboard going at how many meters per second, and they all pretty much feel the same. You got to get out of the carriage and you got to know the nuts and bolts of it to know what the differences are, but you. You know what we did with Renew is we did things in the industry that we had not been done at the time, right? For the most part, our industry was relying on smaller manufacturers , a lot of them from Germany. And Denmark, for the most part to sell us a full table base steel feet, steel legs that go up and down steal under carriage, we buy it, we put a top on it, we call it ours. That was the industry at the time. So this was the first time where we actually reached further up in the product. And said, well, what if the you know, the top support was a die cast aluminum piece that, you know, when you bang your knee into it, you are not going to be cursing the manufacturer because it hurt so bad and, you know, everybody has cables on their desk. What if we put something between the legs that actually managed some of those cables and made the you know, it looks like people are scaling walls when you raise your tables up sometimes so we can clean up that mess and we will put the best looking foot in the industry on it? Another diecast piece and yes, to the layman, it is still a rectangular column that, you know, telescopes and goes up and down. But the different things we were able to add to it at the time was brand new to the to the furniture industry in North America.

Yeah, very cool. Were there any novel technologies or materials or methodologies that you guys used or discovered throughout that process?

Yeah, that would there was, you know, once again at the time we all kind of bought somebody else's legs they developed and put our top on it and called in ours, which meant for the most part. To get the thing to go up and down, it had an up and down arrow button, so so you push the button to go up, hold it, push the button to go down. And our designer kind of came in 1 day, I will never forget it and said, you know, I just we are in the middle of launching. We have already set the project budget. We have already set the timeline right. Anything now would be the dreaded scope creep that engineers hate designer comes in and says, I got a neat idea and you can see all the engineers doing this and I am like, what do you got? What is it? He is like, you know, the switch is something no 1 has touched and I had an idea. It is like I love a switch that lights up and gives you feedback that it is working because there is an inherent delay in these tables because they do not use a certain amount of power while they are resting. So they take a minute to warm up before they start moving. So we are going to light it up to tell you, Hey, I am I am getting there, I am like an old man getting out of a chair. I do not worry, I will make it up. And I would like it to be a paddle that kind of feels more like a you know, you use the phrase like a tongue. Well, you are going to have to tell me more about that. So we ended up developing a illuminated translucent paddle with a with a softer TPU euro thing. That when you move the paddle up, table goes up, push the pedal down, table goes down, nobody in the industry at the time had a simple paddle switch to make electronics tables go up and down.

I am kind of getting off the the normal question you track, but did did the scope actually creep and did that affect your timeline and and all that?

It did not actually.

Are you able to work?

I mean, you know, product development is all a combination of time money and scope, right? So here is your scope. Do you have enough time and money to get it done and once you set the time and you have the money. Something is got to give, right? So we did not have to affect the time, but we contracted in some additional engineering support probably much like the services that you offer to say, hey, let us not interrupt the current timeline, but we are, you know, way under budget on spending. So let us use that extra money and and see if we can not get this to catch up and then jump on board the train, if you will.

Okay, so you were able to deliver on the same time frame? It just cost the money to do it, yeah.

Yes, correct. Yep.

So we have helped design literally thousands of products and pretty much every journey is a little bit different. Walk us through the journey of developing your product.

It is funny and having done that and then several other products here, you start to look for common themes and it starts to become a little old hat when you do, but like it does not matter who you are, what you are developing if you are doing shoes for Nike or circuit boards for Apple or whatever. You you go through a concept develop and launch phase and it is always those 3. So you you have a concept, you have a good idea, you got to, you know, vet out the concept, is it feasible, it is something we could do that we could go make money at. Is there a business here? Right. Just having a good idea does not mean you should do it then once you think yeah, it is a good idea, we think we could make some money, it is going to it is going to solve a world problem, let us go do it, then you have to develop it, right and that is what actually takes most of the time and investment that is when you throw all your engineers at it and you are doing the prototyping and the testing and the you know, it is no longer just sketches, renderings and whiteboard work. It is like hard core engineering development work, and that is when you spend your money. But that can go relatively smoothly if you have done enough on the concept phase, if you have got your your your company's leadership to buy in, make a decision and stick to it. That if you have gotten, you know, the proper controls in place, the proper document, the proper documentation for what you need to go do, what market you are going after, once you get to that development phase, you are spending a lot of money in your learning, but it is it is tends to be a little more predictable. And then the launch phase is we have developed it. We are making the hard tooling. We are getting ready to do the the mass manufacturing methods necessary to make it a reality and that then becomes very predictable, so. It product development to me feels a little bit like a, you know, snowball, like 1 small good idea at the top of a mountain kind of starts to gain momentum as it works its way down and grow and turn into something that can make a real impact.

Yeah. Yeah, that is a good analogy. So we touched on timeline a minute ago. What was the timeline like for this? Like how long did it take to develop and launch this?

Yeah. We started it at the end of the notion was at the end of 2012, we launched it essentially january 3rd 2014. So the whole the whole true salad development took, you know, 13 / 14 months.

Yeah. And that was from concept to shelf,

Yes, yes. And there are plenty of things we do that take a lot longer. Most of our task seating is a 3 year timeline minimum. The thing that helps the table like that is you know, we still did use a table column from a manufacturing partner of ours, so. The the technology and the structure that makes the thing go up and down was known, right? So we were not I think the the longer things take is the more risk or invention you are trying to tackle.

Yeah, yeah. Do you guys still do that same thing? Do you still buy the existing engineered product or is it all your own design now?

We got we got a bit of a mix now, right? We are we are actually a unique company in the industry from the standpoint that we do 1 of our different table lines since we manufacture our own column right and what is been selling so well, we can barely keep up with it enough to make it every column. So we still have a pretty good mix of working with an outside manufacturing partner and then making our own.

Interesting. So tell us a little bit about your team, how many people were involved in the development and what were their roles?

On that project team, we had a lead engineer and then 2 supporting engineers for us, a supporting engineer typically would be on a couple of different projects. So it would not be quite as dedicated as the lead engineer. We have engineering support that we get from our folks in India, so we have folks that are in Bangalore that help lend engineering support and cat support, which is great because you get work done 247 that way, right, engineer leaves, you know, hopefully that here we go with the with the lights. And then you show up the next morning, you have got some things to review and you are kind of you get a much better pace that way. Our project teams leadership consists of kind of the 3 legged stool of what we call the design and development lead. So a traditional program lead right, the engineers and the designer kind of report to this person on the project and they are responsible for the timeline and the development budget and so on and so forth. We have what we call a fulfillment lead, which is operational fulfillment. So they are kind of the helping make sure that we are designing it in such a way that we know where and how we are going to make it and then once we get halfway through that implementation phase, they kind of take it and run with it and make it, you know, sellable. Then we have a market launch lead which is helping define the product and the market need up front and then kind of on the backside, helping work with our marketing teams to properly market message sales enablement type work, so. It had a market launch lead, the fulfillment lead and a design and development lead in addition to the lead engineer and 2 supporting engineers. And then there is always a series of shared services that we have to lean into like database work and engineering , change order administration and, you know, routings and all the other stuff out in operations to make it a reality, so.

And of course, we we work with outside designers, industrial designers to get their best thoughts on our products.

Sure. Very interesting. What were some of the key milestones or achievements that that you guys hit along the way?

An interesting 1 is, you know, we have a process like a lot of other folks and, you know, in the concept phase, we go through things like a design intent phase and a concept proposal where we proposing the concept to meet the design intent. And then, hey, we have concept selected, we have selected this, our biggest stage gate is probably our business proposal level. That is just short p p for sure. That is where everything kind of comes together to say, this is a good idea, this is what it is going to be here is how much money we can make me as the project lead. Mill, you give me $1.5 million to do this project and here is the return on your investment over the course of the next 3 years. So those tend to be a bit more glorious from a executive involvement standpoint. And I remember on this 1. Brian Walker was our CEO. At the time I had an individual meeting with him, which. Was I probably 42, maybe in my early 40 s. So still kind of a kid ish.

Mmm, the kids today would not say that.

It depends on who is listening to. This would decline by kid. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the guys that are helping you with this podcast probably like, what, 42 Ancient? But I felt like that because I was still pretty young in my leadership career, so sitting 1 on 1 with our CEO was, you know, it was impactful for me and then to have your CEO look at you something you are so proud of and say. That kind of looks like a lot of other things that I have seen like we did not really innovate on the column, did we? But let me tell you and but when you start to tell the story of the table and what we are doing, it is like it was an industry leading table at the time. But yes, we did not invent a new way for a table to float on air and go up and down.

Right, so what kind of prototyping processes were involved during the development ?

So we use we have a pretty extensive model shop here where we can machine pretty much anything wood, aluminum steel, small e cast plastic parts, 3D printed parts, so we would be prototyping production representative product. But rather than diecasting an aluminum piece, we machine it, right, so we get we get the final results, but we just get there with a more labor intensive way and oftentimes what we will do with diecast parts when we get into like testing in particular because machined aluminum tends to be a bit stronger than die cast just the nature of the grain structure of the metal, and you could be overconfident by testing a machined part. So we like to try and do low investment die casting. Which, you know, you make an aluminum tool to make aluminum parts.

And as you can imagine, they do not last quite as long as the steel tools do, but they get a lot closer to what you are looking for in the end and a lot more parts cheaper than machining, so. A lot a lot of 3D printing, a lot of machining, but in the end to a fair amount of low investment, low volume tooling methods.

So even though it is die cast, I mean, that in the injection mold world you have, you know, bridge tooling that sometimes they will call it is an aluminum mold that, you know, you can get a few parts off of so you can actually do real testing and all that and then you go build the expensive tool.

Yeah, it was that like a mud base is something where it is like you can kind of interchange all the different things in there and it just squirts a whole bunch of different parts all at once and.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So it is the same thing for you that way. You can get actual production level parts that not the the big expense of the steel to them.

Correct. And the timing too, right? I mean, I think it is interesting when you work for a bigger company like this, you have a little more money to do that type of prototyping early so you can put off the risk of investing in a production tool, smaller companies can not do that as much. So they jump right to the production tool and then they just take the time on the back end to make the changes necessary to fix anything that is not going right.

Yeah, yeah. That is interesting. So believe it or not, we are already coming towards the end of the questions I have, but I am shifting gears a little bit. What if you could go back in time and change 1 thing about developing this product, what would it be?

It is. It is hard to because we did so much with it. It is hard to say. But we we sometimes give in a bit too much to this is going to sound bad what our salespeople are asking for. In that, right, I mean, it is like if you need to have a statement align, that is a million Skus long so that I can sell anything to anybody at any time. Right. And I am looking back it is like I probably overburdened the project team a little bit by tackling such an expansive vocabulary of sizes and and so on and so forth and. Probably could have narrowed that quite a bit and then just listen to the market to what they are buying from our custom team and added the standard products after the fact.

Yeah, yeah. Based on the response about the CEO I thought maybe you would say we should have done a custom column or something.

Yeah, yeah. I think it was an interesting project for me too because we had 3 other large initiatives going all at the same time, which we are taking more of the, we will say corporate focus. So I kind of always found myself in the position of arguing for funding or attention or I was a little kid in the corner holding his breath, stopping his feet. I think if I had gone that far, I would not have gotten the funding and support, yeah.

Yeah. Sure. What are some of the trends that you you know in your corner of the product development world? What are some of the trends you see emerging?

It is interesting, you know, back in the Dilbert and everybody knows Dilbert, right the sea of panel systems, right? Well, Herman Miller helped create that whole thing with action office. Back in the 60 s, 60 Action Office was not intended to be a cubicle, right? It was intended to be just space dividers for different open Plan meeting spaces, but people quickly turned it into small offices and a big open plan that type of thing has evolved into several different versions, which you are probably all familiar with that, particularly with the pandemic and even before. It is kind of going away right and in our industry in order to make those things at the volume we had to make them and the price that we are able to sell them at, we had a huge amount of investment in tooling. And therefore, when someone comes to ask us, hey, can you customize it and do this, we get to say yes or no because there is certain capabilities, we have to do it to certain capabilities, we do not. As those panels start to go away and you just need some legs to help a table go up and down, maybe a screen to help divide you from your neighbor a little bit, right, the office got a lot more lightweight, the ability to customize became a lot easier to achieve for smaller companies. And I think the industry interesting trend in our industry in particular is that our competitors went from 3 or 4 major competitors to dozens, right? We find ourselves competing against small to medium sized manufacturing companies all the time. Because their ability to be fast and nimble is customer wants it like this. You will do that whatever it takes. Give us the revenue. So our our ability to respond to those needs has really shifted in the last decade.

Yeah, that is interesting, yeah. I mean, that before I started impulse, I was in a cube farm and, you know, we knew of the millers and the moles and the steel case and all that and it seemed like that that that was kind of the corner of the market as a whole and and to hear now that there are dozens that that is definitely changed.

Yeah, yeah. There is smaller companies like Watson is a small storage and table company out in Seattle and and work is a small table company over here just east of Grand Rapids. They do a fair amount of table work, right, and we find ourselves competing against them, so.

So you have been doing this for a while, so reflecting on all the challenges and successes that you have encountered developing products, what words of wisdom would share with those looking to make a significant impact in the product development industry?

Do not be scared to think outside of your world a little bit, right? And I say that because I think that the renewed table was my first opportunity to be looking at something where I did I went to a furniture show in Cologne, Germany, it is called Agtech. It is like the big furniture show in Europe. We have an equivalent here called Nikan. And as I went around, I am like, I am not really seeing anything from anybody that is near what we are chasing and it kind of made me realize that we are making a world class table. And I think do not best advice I would give you is as you get into these ideas, do not do not limit yourself, right? I mean, I am not saying every time you do something, make it the best in the world, right, or, you know, die trying. But when you get to some good ideas and you get to some good work, even when your CEO says but you are not doing anything about the column, you can still be looking for the best in the world and and still achieving it.

Yeah, that is that is awesome. So before we wrap up, is there anything else you want to mention with regards to the product or product development in general?

That is a obviously I have spent about 5 or 6 years at Steelcase and going on 24 years here at Miller Knowles, 30 or so years around product 1 way or the other, right, either make customizing it, making it from scratch or managing it from a business standpoint. I do not know, I just think if I I kind of fell into this, this was not what I went to school for, but I kind of found a knack for creative problem solving and I am able to apply creative problem solving to products. I would say to anybody that is kind of young in their career, find what your niche is and what you are, what everybody says, find your passion, yeah, find what you are good at, right and when you find what you are good at, your passion will come. So it is AI ended up being good at creative problem solving and I like applying it to product, so I have been able to stick around with that for a while.

Cool. Those are good words before we end. Where can we find more about the is the product still in the market, by the way?

Products on the market today. Yep, there is a there is a we have a much larger range of products to go with it now, right? But if you went to MillerKnoll.com and just did a search on Renew, this table line would come up, you could kind of get a sense of what we are talking about.

Awesome, I will make sure to put that in the show notes. So I really appreciate you doing this form me.

All right, you bet it was a lot of fun.