EPISODE 17 - SCOTT LOSIK

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 former Senior Director of Engineering at Fortune Brands Innovations, a company who's portfolio of brands includes Aqualisa, Emtek, Therma-Tru, Fiberon, Master Lock, and SentrySafe.

Our guest has over three decades of experience in developing new products, generating value, and overseeing multi-million-dollar facilities and equipment upgrades across various industries. Outside of his professional life he enjoys fishing, particularly traveling to coastal destinations and targeting new species to catch.

Scott Losik was born and raised just outside Detroit, Michigan. He obtained his degree in mechanical engineering from Michigan State University and kicked off his career at Ford Motor Company and eventually earned a Master's degree in Automotive Engineering from the University of Michigan. At Ford's engine lab in Dearborn, Scott specialized in engine testing and played a pivotal role in establishing new test facilities and capabilities, handling everything from testing methodologies to strategic planning and project management. Scott's expertise eventually led him to Fortune Brands, where he initially focused on faucets before expanding into building products like doors and decking.

In our discussion we learn about the product development project that Scott spearheaded called the Hybrid Valve. This innovative product platform simplified over 50 bath faucet configurations into just five valve assemblies that can be repeated across multiple products. We explore the challenges of developing the product platform, the importance of collaboration with marketing and design teams to isolate key requirements, and the value of understanding customer needs.

Scott shares insights into the benefits of platforming and the impact it has on a business, and we discuss the potential role of AI in product development for concept design and marketing insight. Scott provides a unique perspective on product development speaking from a project leadership perspective and analyzing how small decisions upfront have large impacts with a team down the line.

Show Notes:

Podcast Transcript:

Hey, Scott, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks, Troy. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Looking forward to our conversation .

I am glad you are here. So I started impulse a little over 25, actually almost 26 years ago, I worked for a product design company. They had everything under 1 roof. I tell everybody I got my master's degree in product development working there saw the writing on the wall after several years that they were not going to be in it for the long haul. So I started impulse and that is kind of how I got into product development . So how did you get into product development ?

Well, I started actually it was a right out of college. I graduated from Michigan State. I guess we will start with an engineering degree of chemical engineering degree and I was in the Detroit area, so like so many others, I went directly into the automotive industry, so my first job was at Ford. And incidentally, I did not start actually in product development per se, I actually started in of a mix of testing and facilities, so I had a job where I was a test engineer, which the majority of that job was actually like implementing new test facilities, I did some testing. You know, for requests for requests and engineers at the time, which was kind of boring at the time, I was really just running a test and writing report, but we actually put in new test facilities and so that is where I got of. Introduced into product development was all the engineers I worked with are actually working on product development , so over time, I moved into various other roles at Ford over the years, which included other testing roles and design goals and so forth, so over the course. Of many years, I gained experience there at Ford and testing design and even in the Strategy Department in project management as well, so I got quite a bit of experience over the years working at Ford and that diverse background actually led me into future roles when when I left. Ford, I worked for a supplier doing some design work and then eventually I went my last company I worked for was called Fortune Brands Innovations . So I moved completely out of the automotive industry into consumer goods and building in both consumer goods and building products. So what is been interesting, I guess in my career, I have had a chance to take, you know, some of that like hard core automotive engineering experience, if you will, if you are familiar with automotive, it is very kind of very structured and very process oriented and move it into some of these other industries. So like consumer goods and building products. So like that was, I think very good training ground for me to take some of that. You know, process and rigor and put some of that into these other industries and, you know, incidentally a lot you know, there are some of the, you know, some of the other industries they are very, you know, kind of loose on their engineering and they do not follow like structure process, not that they need to go as far as automotive. I mean, that was the balancing act I had to had to play as I move into other industries, you can not just go hard core automotive and some of these consumer goods companies because, you know, they are just not. You know, the product is not really suitable for it, so it is just been a really interesting journey and, you know, I have spanned, like I said, multiple industries and then also, you know, just a variety of products I have worked on when I was in automotive, I worked on engines, I worked in Chasse when I Moved into consumer goods and building products. So at Fortune Brands, I worked on faucets, then I worked on what they called their outdoors portfolio, which was like doors and decking products. So just been a real interesting, you know, breadth of different products that have worked on over the years.

Very interesting. And what about the products you want to talk about today? Why what is it and and why did you choose that 1?

Yeah. So what I chose today it is it is back when I worked on fast and what was the mowing brain for Fortune Brands, it was back in the 20 1516 time frame, we developed a what we call the hybrid valve. So if you think about the valve structure being sort of the chasse for a faucet, so it is sort of the what you see under we call under deck or under the counter, so it is the stuff that you do not see. When you are looking at a faucet, but it is it is analogous to the, you know, the chass and an automobile if you think about product platforms and automobiles , right, so the automotive companies develop these, you know, standardized platforms, so sized chasse, you know, at the same brakes and suspension and so forth. And because in the end the customer can not see it, they just want it to perform, right? So really it enables the company to like develop products faster because they do not have to redesign, you know, chassis and wheels and brakes and suspensions for every product. And prior to starting this hybrid valve project within mowing and that is actually how I got hired in because of my automotive experience, I got hired and I actually started what they called the platforms engineering group there. I was 1 of 2 people that built into over time like a 20 person team. We you know, we took that experience a couple of us from other industries and brought in and looked at, okay, we need to develop some product platforms that are more standardized . The hybrid valve started off with what they call their 2 handle center set, which is a if you think of a small bath falls that you see with 2 handles in, you know, in your bathroom, they had, believe it or not, like just an immense amount of variation within their product portfolio, so the valve under structure under that false that they had over 53 different combinations at the time, which seems almost overwhelming for something that is a standardized size, so you can just imagine these things are developed over the course of, you know, a couple of decades. And really it is it is if you think about it, it is just designing everyone sort of in a box almost or thinking of them individually. So each 1 was designed and optimized for that specific project versus thinking about the portfolio as a whole. So we had to really take a step back and look at the portfolio and say, okay, well, what do we need to do to really get this down to to a portfolio that makes sense that we can develop derivative products off of that we do not have to have all this variation to redo all the the valve work because You think the valve is the pressure vessels, so there is a validation process that happens every time and you are redoing this every time, so you that adds a lot of time and money and retooling every time, so. Long story short, we decide we are going to develop kind of a good, better best platform, try to get this down to just a couple of valves that we can build products off of in the hybrid valve at the time is what we call the project we developed sort of a good, better best product strategy and I can walk through kind of the details on each 1 of those.

Yeah. So I would love to hear the details, but just to clarify, you said you went from it was was it 54 different valves? 53 different valves. We got it down in the end to about it all said and done. There was about 5 different configurations . So we did sort of the good, better, best and there was a couple other configurations that we had to have for some specialty products. But it just was a tremendous amount of, you know, reduction and variation. You can imagine the impact on manufacturing and sourcing and the rest of the company over time. It just was a tremendous , you know, a tremendous value of the company.

Sure. Yeah. Can you give us some more detail about about the products? I mean it and from an ignorant standpoint, why could not you just have 1 valve that that did everything? What what were the reasons for having to end up with, I think you said 5.

Sure. So we so we called it so we try to develop like a good better best, right? So the majority of the valves in the faucet industry at the time were all complete brass valves. So like brass was king and everything was made out of brass either forge or machine parts or a combination of the 2. And there were some nuances between each 1 of the balls for every product because you had differences and handle sizes and dimensions on the faucet, so they did some nuances and they went to different suppliers because they are trying to get a better price on 1 versus the other. So every supplier would design it a little bit. You have been in the industry a long time, you know, if you take the same design and move from 1 supplier to another, they are going to make changes because their manufacturing process is different. So e.g., if I am doing a a CASB versus a forge valve versus a past the machine. The product itself is going to look different because the process they use, even though it is the same, it is not really the same. So and they just all this variation over time they had done all these different vendors and all these different products. And they had some specialty products as well that were, you know, dimension differently. They had to do specialized V. So, I mean, it was just amazing when you dig into the details just the the amount of variation you saw so. What we what we did it is we want to develop sort of a bit better best strategy, right? So at the time, they were struggling in the retail industry to maintain their margins, right. So some of the competitors have already started moving towards more use of composite and plastic materials in their faucets and the underbody. So I said, okay, well, we need to develop, you know, a new valve with some use of plastic at least for our good segment where we can go into retail like the home depots and loans of the world. And so we developed. Sort of the low end was we developed a combination of hybrid, we call the hybrid because it was plastic and brass or composite and brass. And that initial product was actually instead of a solid brass valve we had it was actually insert molded. We had sort of 2 legs, 2 brass legs, if you think about the legs as the pieces that hang down that you connect your, you know, your your your water lines to you and then the part that fits up underneath the faucet that holds the cartridges is actually, you know, a composite material that we did at the time. So we had to develop. We actually had developed some customized materials and work with a couple of different vendors on this insert molding process. So you know that those are some of the challenges because we you know, Mown being a company that, you know, quality was still very, very important to the company. So we still had a rigorous test requirements that we still had to meet. So, you know, that is where the challenges lied in this project was developing the, you know, the right plastic material and still being able to meet all of the, you know, consumer requirements and be able to hold, you know, hold our quality study, you know, throughout the project.

Interesting. You know, you you kind of mentioned you had to come up with a custom material, I mean, with any other novel technologies and materials or even methodologies that you guys discovered developing the product?

I think now it is just well, insert molding at the time was new to me. I would not say that is, you know, nothing new to you know, it is been around for a long time but me personally that was kind of exciting with the project because at the time I would never, you know, I have been introduced all, you know, forging and machining and casting throughout my career. I have seen all those processes. So this was interesting. We had worked with a actually was a vendor in China we were working with who was doing the project for us, so I took a trip out there with, you know, a couple of us took a trip out there, the sourcing person myself and 1 of another 1 of the engineering managers at the time and we worked with, you know. When they were doing sort of the development of a product, we went out there for like a week, we got to see what they were doing and there was a lot of you know, we do a little bit tweaks to the process. We actually did some mold flow analysis. They started off as some flow analysis to try to get us to the right parameters, but we still had to we did some actually some testing on site to looking at the 1 of the critical parameters at the time was because, you know, if you are putting on a line under if you are putting on the water line, you are applying torque to the to the I call the legs coming down, right? So 1 of the issues we had was the it was cracking the upper body of the valve, right? So we had the torque. We still want to make sure that, you know, people are going to put these in and crack crack the valves every time they put them in. So we had some strength issues we had to work through. But we are able to kind of optimize that through process once we have the right material and we actually did that work kind of live. We did like I said, we did a mold flow to kind of get the first. You know, the first basis for our for our work and then we did several iterations over the course of the week and we kind of did live testing here. So that was 1 of the things I remember most about that kind of that initial project is going on there kind of working hand in hand with, you know, 1 of our other it was actually at the time it was the engineering manager for the retail business unit. I was in the platform, but we are kind of we were, you know, equivalents, but we are working kind of hand in hand along with the sourcing person as well in the vendor. So it was, you know, it was a good collaboration at the time and those are to me are some of the memorable moments when you are working in product development when you get like a group of people working together kind of solve a problem.

Yeah. Yeah, that is interesting. You know, insert molding can be a little bit of a challenge to dial in sometimes, but it sounded sounds like you guys got to dialed in pretty quick, like in that time that you were there during that week. In the time we are there, we like I said though, they did a little pre work and they did, you know, some old flow analysis to try to get the starting parameters, so they did some. Free works, I do not think we did everything in the week right there. You know, vendor themselves did sort of pre work and they thought they were, you know, say 80, 90 % there. And then we went there and kind of finished it out.

So, I do not want to like, oversell to say that we did some miracle in a week but it you know, it was a few weeks worth of work but they did pretty did pretty good. I mean, the team there was. You know, it was really good the vendor he worked with over and it was Jean in China that we worked at the time.

Okay. So you mentioned kind of tweaking the material. Did you change the material while you were there or was it adding more?

No, no, no, we did. We changed the through analysis. So we did, you know, we did fa analysis and determine the right material. So we did, you know, we did that through, you know, the pre work.

Okay. So before the tools made you I was going to ask you handled the shrink differences and things like that, but you did not have.

Before the yeah, we did a lot of analysis up front and we handled the major you know, that was handled through looking at, okay, what are the strength requirements of material and you know, we are able to luckily we were able to dial in through fa analysis versus trial there because, you know, you know, that can be quite expensive. As well because to your point, like if you pick 2 different materials, you can not use the same mole because shrink rates are different than your dimensions are out and all that. So although you can tweak the we had, you know, you can tweak the dimensions a little bit as you probably know with with the parameters on The on the machinery role, when you have temperature and pressure, it changes dimensions slightly, but if you are way off, you are not going to get there.

Yeah, yeah, interesting. So we have literally helped develop thousands of products and every 1 of those journeys is a little bit different. So kind of walk us through the journey of developing this. What were the steps involved?

Oh, yeah, sure. I think, you know, like most, you know, this is a standard process, you know, you you develop you list out kind of the requirements , you develop concepts, um, and then you develop prototypes and eventually you you know, you are you are finalizing a design and you are kicking off tools. Which is kind of standard. But I think what is different about this, I think to highlight different from like most products because we are doing like a product platform that we plan to like build all these derivative products on. Probably the the the most challenging piece for this was sort of the upfront work right of the analysis we we have. We really had to identify, okay, what are all the kind of like thinking about the future? What are the different products we want to develop on this platform? So we had to feature in those future designs in this product. So that is different than you would normally do if like just developing a product for a group of customers you are actually trying to feature in. So e.g., I will give you an e.g., okay, what are all the different handle lengths and weights and so forth that you think you are going to need on future faucets for this, right, because we had requirements around the torque you put on a handle, also a cyclic fatigue requirement , so if I if I put a making a 4 " handle versus a 2 " handle, well, those as you know, the torque is much different on the cartridge and on the valve itself as well, right? So we had to really get agreement because you had to put some box around it right because you are going to get to the point where you. You can not just design it so I can have a 22 " handle. I am exaggerating it, of course because then you would way over design the product would be over cost and it would not be a good platform to build on, right? So you had to like be reasonable. With the marketing folks. And so those are kind of the challenges and you know this through product development , some of the biggest challenges are like the collaboration with the folks that you are working with, not just not necessarily the design of the product itself, which is a challenge quite often, but. Working with, you know, the folks that are, you know, featuring the products and are thinking about what, you know, what the future products look like, right, and getting alignment on, okay, well, what is, you know, what where do we think we are going because nobody has a crystal ball. So you are you know, a lot of that is guesswork. It is getting alignment on, hey, here is how I am going to put my box and here is I am going to design it, you know, in the end. Once you develop a platform, I mean, the whole beauty of is you get down to this, you know, a handful of valves and then later on you can you can you can just redesign it. So then you have 1 thing to redesign versus, you know, 20 or 30 or 40, right? So in the end it is a much better place to be for a company then, you know, just endless amounts of variation.

So if you did kind of miss on the futuristic part and you did not need a 22 " long handle, you could redesign it and just make it strong enough and move on.

We we we could redesign it or we could design a, you know, a 1 off of a really or another platform if we really thought that was something that is going to be a future t. Right, so. What we always used to say about platforming Troy is that what you want to do is you want you want to eliminate useless variation and and keep useful variation, right, so we just keep the variation that we need in order to satisfy the customer and anything above and beyond that is waste. Right. So we we do not necessarily if you think about developing a product, the most efficient way to develop products is to change as little as possible and is as engineers. We do not think that way always right. We think we want to just redesign something from scratch every time, but as business people. The goal is to redesign as little as possible because a you spend a lot less money, we spend a lot less time and see you have a lot a lot less propensity to have issues with quality and so forth, right? If they are changing less, go back to the automobile analogy, right? So like if I can just Refresh, you know, you have seen they just refresh the front face and maybe put some new seats in in the new interior. Well, that is a heck of a lot, you know, cheaper and more efficient and faster than doing a complete new chasse, right? So and if it satisfied the customer, then what is wrong with that? There is nothing wrong with that because in the end, you know, we are trying to sell products that people want, they want to buy and and make the company's money. And, you know, again, as engineers, I think we we are natural tinkers. If we want to change things, we want to dig in and just make everything better as well, you know, 1 of the old saying that, you know, we used to use in the industry where you do not do not let perfect it in the way of good, right, because sometimes you you know, good is good enough to make money and to sell the product. And you know, myself, I am a perfectionist at times as well. Right, so it is kind of hard to weigh that between, you know, perfection and what is good enough.

Sure. Now that is interesting. You you were saying that about you want to change as little as possible. I will probably offend somebody, but I am a fan of Tesla and they just refreshed the model 3 in the last, I think 6 months or so and all they did was. Maybe change the bumper, you know, change the rear end, you know, I mean, that it was very little change and there is kind of a new car now, you know, they did some interior work and things like that too. But like you said, the platform is all the same, so

Like, you know, the old thing, if it is not broke, do not fix it, right? So like if you get something that is working on I mean, the reason to change something is because it is not working or the customer wants something different, right? Or or you are trying to do something different to try to gain new business, something that nobody else has, right? You know, that is when you get into the innovation space, right, when you are trying to develop something. That is not out there at all versus like if you think about product development , a vast majority of product development is like we like to talk a lot about innovation that is really cool and ****, but a large part of product development is are these refreshes and things like that where you are refreshing products that are already out there. And if you think about the way a company operates, we want to spend as little time as possible doing that and as much time as you know, spend more efforts on the innovation. So how can we take our resources off, refreshing, make that go very efficiently and just make that sort of very easy and very iterative and then focus Our high power onto the innovation space, which may only be 10 % of what we are doing, but if I can put a bigger effort on that, then I can, you know, I can innovate more and spend less time. Doing all these kind of product refreshes and line extensions, whatever term you want to use, every company use a different, you know, a different terminology, but those are are kind of your bread and butter of, you know, the companies do it, it will pick them and I work for bigger companies, but I mean, obviously smaller companies are doing innovative products, but I mean, you know, this is sort of your, you know, your normal product development .

Yeah, yeah. What was the timeline like to develop the the whole platform, I guess?

Once once we got kind of the requirements all nailed down on that portion. So I will leave that up for what we can talk about that. I think it was about a 18 month kind of time frame, you know, develop that. We had a lot I said we had a lot of that upfront work to to kind of hone in on, you know, what what are the future requirements and all that. There was a lot of free work. You know, that took, you know, 6 months to a year ahead of that. So, you know, if you wanted to look at the whole thing, maybe you are looking to 2 and a half years if you call that pre work, but then here is the interesting thing, Troy is once that was in place. Then, you know, you had 1 P and again, we are just talking about the good platform. We did like a better best, but I think this is good, you know, the same process held through for the other ones. But once we had that in place and this was, you know, focus on the retail projects like I mentioned before, right? And retail. Like they really like to refresh their products very often, right? So in the past when we did like a new valve, you are looking at like an 18 month project for retail, which that was too slow for. You know, the home peoples and lows the world, but we got that down in the you know, nowadays they are doing that in like, 6 months or less even less in some cases.

Oh, wow.

So, I mean, you really cut it down like, you know, to like 103rd of what it was and I am talking about if you did a Whole new and everything. But, I mean, they really changed the way they thought it also made it easier because the design review process we use was much more rigorous for, you know, something where you are doing a lot of change because you have to have a lot more eyes on and a lot more. You give you a lot more detail or a put a lot more rigor into it. But if you have already got a platform that works and it is tested and validated really, then you just get so that you are just changing the, you know, the components that the customer sees you are just you know, you are you are Just changing handles. And spouts, and as long as you stay within the design envelope because we developed what we call design interfaces, right, so there is a design interface guide that as long as you follow these guidelines so that my.

You know, my handle, e.g., is this long and this high and weighs this much or less than you are within the envelope, then we have already validated the design. You are good to go, you do not need to do any testing you basically go from. As a as a matter of fact, they have evolved so much and this again, this is, you know, back in the 2016 time frame, they have evolved so much where they are actually working with 1 of their vendor partners who makes handles and spouts and they are actually able to send the designs right to the vendor, like from I D and they go they skip over the whole internal and they go right to the vendor and they just tool it up in their radio launch it. So I mean that is how a streamlined has become whereas in the past, you know, it was it was a much longer more complicated process. So, I mean, as we are talking, you probably really get a sense of how that really transform the business. So I wanted to talk about this product. Again, the valve itself, it is not, you know, insert mold. I mean, these are things that are, you know, the the processes in that are not that exciting but it is it is the way to transform the business and allow them to be much more, you know, streamlined and productive over the over the last, you know, 708 years.

Yeah, yeah, that is actually that is pretty awesome. Are they still using the same platform as far as you know?

Yeah, yeah. As far as I know, yes, and they know they are. Yeah, I mean, if you went to a, you know, like a Home Depot or a low and and bought like, a moen closet, you know, you would be looking at, you know, you would be lookingfor.

Interesting. Tell us about the team that was involved and you can do the whole thing. I know there was you mentioned marketing upfront, but what did the team look like to get this created?

For sure, it is actually a pretty compact team when we started. So I again, I think I mentioned earlier like I started when they hired me and it was myself and 1 other person started the the team, the platform group that they call the platform engineering group, but that team group. Over time to about, you know, about 20 people, but just for this specific project, it was myself I had a project manager that was reported to me directly on the project and then we had a couple of engineers, so we had a team of like 4 or 5 people that specifically on this 1 valve. And then I mentioned there was a couple of you know, like a better best vow but we had, you know, a small team on those 2. So you are talking about a small team of just a couple of couple of folks now, you know. There was obviously collaboration with the other business, you know, within the business collaboration with other groups I mentioned earlier, like e.g., the there was a manager of engineering with the retail business unit. So for this 1, which was really focused on the retail business unit like we are working very closely with him and 1 of his engineers. So it was not just self all self contained. It was weird driving the work, but they were also partner and partnering with them to do some of the work as well. So, you know, all in all, you just technical folks, we had a team of, you know, less than, you know, 7 or 8 people. And then I mentioned collaboration with a vendor and then what you know, of course, you know, sourcing and marketing as well to help with requirements and making sure that we are meeting their expectations and so forth.

Sure. Did you little side question they brought you in for this project, so they had already identified that, hey, we want to platform these these valves.

They wanted to platform their products. And so we picked that 1 after I came in, we did. So if you think again about platforming the the first step and we actually developed the whole process for her platform and there was like 4 phases. So there was AI will just maybe highlight this real quickly. So the first phase is analyze so you analyze your product portfolio and figure out, you know, what where all the variation is and the next phase was what we call stabilize and standardized . So you want. So then that gets into like, okay, well where is unneeded variation? So there is some things we did just to eliminate some products that were like super low volume we were not selling. So we just kind of eliminated and got rid of them. And then we also looked at things that were like were not performing well. So like where do we have quality issues? So you want to look at those type of things, they are doing the analysis. Then then the 3rd phase is optimized, so then, okay, now we are going to optimize and develop a platform that was kind of this project where we are going to optimize a platform that we can use going forward. And then the last phase is innovate and that is after you get the platform all in place and that is what I mentioned earlier. But and I have a single platform in place and I can innovate off that platform and I can I can evolve and I can change it in, you know, it is sort of a combination of optimizing and innovate, but now I can evolve off of that, right? So how it started again was I came in we looked at and I took the 2 handle because a 2 handle product time was very complicated . We started there. There was another guy working there with me. We did hand in hand. He was working on the 1 handle kitchen fast, so he was doing some more stuff there. So we be working hand in hand. We worked together on kind of a couple different, you know, platform opportunities . So they started with 2 handle and 1 handle kitchen platforms to try to start their platforms there and they have evolved over the last 8 years. I know that group crew and I had that group for a while then I I left and took a different role, but that group is still in place and someone else took back to my position and that group is still strong like guiding the platforms as they move forward in the future.

Very interesting. You know you have mentioned several things and and then the ultimate success and savings from a business standpoint of the product. But what were some of the key milestones and achievements that were reached during the development ?

Yeah, I mean, 1 of the I guess, you know, obviously a business, you know, cost was was, you know, as you can probably I am alluding to it, right? So you got an all brass valve using like a hybrid valve, its use of composite, even though it was like a specialized composite, we still saved. I think it was somewhere and I am going to code. It is somewhere the neighborhood of 8 to 10 % on the COGS for, you know, for a for a retail or low end retail, you know, kind of our entry level retail fast film, it was pretty significant at the time because they were, you know, they were uncompetitive with with, you know, every because the market they were uncompetitive with some of the, you know, competition from a cost standpoint, so just help them to achieve better margins and develop products faster.

So I think that was 1 of the big successes. I guess the other milestone for me I mentioned it, but I think when we did our first first shots run off when we got the valve working at the vendor in China, that was a huge milestone because that was sort of okay, now we have got this thing where it is working right? And we have got over some of the issues we had and it is like, okay, now it is full steam ahead. Um, we need to get this thing in production and move forward. So those kind of I think of those things and meeting the cost targets and getting this. You know, the design for manufacturing all worked out. We were able to make this on site at the vendor. We kind of 2 of the things that in my mind stick out is sort of the most important things for the business at the time.

Yeah. And interesting, you mentioned the cost of goods dropped. Was that because the volumes went up, so you were able to get some cost savings because the high volume or was it insert design or?

It. It is. It is 2 things. It is the material cost itself was lower but then now we are developing because you are going from all brass to a use of composite and brass.

So, you know, we reduced the brass content by you know. 50 to 75 %, right. And but we still have brass in it, but now we have all this use of even that was a specialized, you know, plastic composite material. It is still like cost per pound is way less than brass. And so the cost of the valve itself was less but also as you as you can probably as you are alluding to like now, we have a higher volume. We can put this on because we are not spreading it over all these from that that happened over time. But you know, we may board more and more of these. So then sourcing was able to develop, you know. You know, you know, leverage this high volume and get a little bit better pricing and work out some negotiations with but the vendor was supplying it. So I think you are here to get the best of both worlds there. It is interesting I think an interesting point here trying to make is that. When you when you develop a product by itself without looking at the whole platform, you can sometimes optimize the cost for that 1 product. But then moving forward, if you keep doing that over and over and over again, next thing you know, your portfolio is not optimized. So this was it is it is a nuance that I think a lot of people do not understand like the because the project team, you know, if you are marketing, all you want to do is you want that product to be the right cost at the right time and so forth. But they are not looking at the whole portfolio of the whole business. So like our view was looking at the whole business as a whole, right? So any 1 project there. There were some projects that actually cost more. But as a portfolio as a whole, it would save the money to save the company a ton of money, right? So I think of it in those terms, right, because they are they might have negotiated for this 1 project. I am getting a really good cost for this 1 valve and this 1 product I am doing. But I am not looking at the big picture. So in the end, the company as a whole wants to save money even if that project in that particular customer might be paying a little bit more, that is a nuance that I think a lot of people would not would not catch unless you kind of work through this and really seen the math work out in your own with kind of with your own 2 eyes.

yeah. Yeah, that is really interesting that that you have you have reduced all this cost and all this in you take it out all this time but, you know, a few projects or a few products suffer for lack of a better term, they get more expensive just because now they have got to get pulled into that platform that you would not think that is something that would happen, but I guess that makes sense.

Well, I mean, the other I guess the other thing that another nuance here, I am getting really into the weeds, but that is good because, you know, we are for technical guys and I there is sometimes a sourcing negotiates a really good price on something and they keep keeping the product around for a long time. So you get legacy pricing. That does not get updated, right? So if you think about okay, I am just going to keep the same product going on and on and on and on. And we had a lot of issues with this, right? So they have you can think about some of our faucets have been around for a very long time, so then it becomes near impossible to refresh the faucet because it is been around for a long time. Because I have got all this legacy price and they are saying, well, no, you got to hold the price, you got to hold price, but then the vendor just increases the price on the new products to make up for it, right?

So it is. If I am a vendor, right, and I have been work for a vendor too, so that is how they do it right as I got this product that is sort of a loser. But I am making up for it with these other products. Well, really what I want to do is level the playing field so that all of our products are competitive even though you might lose on this 1 that you have had legacy. Pricing off for a very long time even though, but what is hard to understand is the design itself might have been more expensive, but the price you are paying for it was less because you would held on to the same pricing for the last 10 years.

Right, right. Very interesting with all the products we have designed, there is always some kind of big challenge that comes up and I know you have mentioned several, but what was the biggest challenge you and your team face developing this?

I think I am going to go back to like getting alignment with marketing folks and the product teams on what what what this what this product needed to encompass over time. Like I said, what developing sort of the interfaces and the envelope that we are going to work within, right so. That sort of was the foundation of building this because without that, we can not move forward, right, so, you know, it is getting the right okay, well, what handle lengths do I need and what is, you know, what are the parameters that I need to work within so that I can actually validate the product? I think that was probably the biggest challenge because once, like a lot of when I think about product development for me personally, like I personally think 1 of the hardest things to nail down is requirements because I think as engineers, once you have good requirements , you can engineers can develop a product, if you have got rock solid requirements , you can develop, engineers are smart, we can develop products if we have good requirements . Easier said than done though, right, right, because sometimes, you know, you do not know what the requirements are. So you got to take a legal faith and you got to agree on requirements . You and, you know, you get into these scope creep and things like that as you work on projects that have for many, many years, right, you get into scope and that is what that is. What makes projects last so longer like that is, you know. Where we failed projects is the scope creep and it is like, well, what I designed it to do 1 thing and now you wanted to do another thing, now I have got to redesign it and so forth and so on, right? Um, so I am not trying to downplay it how easy that is because it is not easier. I think developing requirements is very difficult and 1 of the things that, you know, I really pushed forward with my teams over the years. Was how do we turn like marketing requirements into engineering requirements? That is another kind of nuance to this, right? So marketing requirement is I want I will make up a fast and examples. I want good handle, feel, okay? Well, what does that mean? You know, we so we need something measurable, right? So I need, you know, 1 of the efforts I need. Okay, so I want, you know. So okay, well, I want light effort, so what does light effort mean? We got to take some measurements and okay, is this light enough, no, is this slight enough, right, so we have to do experiments and work with the marketing and say, okay, well, this is why I like and sometimes you have to bring in focus groups. And get, you know, get their opinion, do you like this like that? So those I think can be the most challenging parts of product development . But once that is nailed down, you tell an engineer I need, you know, I need a, you know, a cartridge that has this handle field and you give them a curve. You know, a force effort c they will figure it out, they will figure out a way to get there right because you have something tangible to work towards.

Sure. With regards to that interaction with up front, I assume there was a lot of education you had to bring like to marketing, marketing, people are not thinking platform wise, right, and they just want every handle possible and. It is. It is it is kind of talking just like we are like, hey, wait a minute, you are trying to explain that, hey, I can not design a good handle field. So, you know, over the years it is been we will just make me another pro. Like a lot of the marketing folks want to just make another prototype and I will tell you when I like it right, but that that becomes very I get it, you know, in the agile world that we live in today, like there is a there is a big mindset to like just create more prototypes and prototypes. And there is there is a space for that too, do not get me wrong, but I think if you can I found if you can do some experiments to nail some of these things down ahead of time that it will save a lot of prototyping over time, right, so versus just making up. 25 prototypes I can make up a, you know, put in a solenoid with a cylinder, then I can vary the, you know, the pressure on and change the effort on the handle and I can say, what do you like? Right, and then once I nail that down, well, then now I can make a real prototype to do that. So there is there is ways to trick that, if you will, that we can do those ahead of time that I think can save a lot of time and money.

Yeah. Yeah, that is interesting. Shifting gears just a little bit before we wrap up. What are some of the trends that you see emerging in product development today?

I think by far the the biggest 1 I think that is going to impact product development is AI and the use of AI and product development . I think we are obviously in the infancy stages, but I think there is it is going to be we are going to be using it across the whole life cycle. I think we are going to be using it to generate concepts, get marketing insights, I see it being used in simulate we will be using it in simulation work. Maybe, you know, testing automation. I mean, there is so many different ways we could use AI. I think it is going to change the whole industry. Again, we are just in the infancy. I mean, there may be a day when we are completely designing products using AI do not know, but I mean, I could that is not inconceivable in my mind, but again, I think that is it is going to change the game for sure.

Yeah, I can see. I think we are a ways away from AI completely eliminating the need for people designing product, but.

Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. But, I mean, it is not it is not inconceivable that 20 years from now or 10 years I do not know what the time frame is, but it is it is happening. It is it is happening faster than we think, right? I mean, I I think I think the big the area I am already seeing it in is is things like, you know, doing like marketing insights and things like that, right? So thinking about, you know, okay, how do I, you know, today? We pay companies like a lot of money to go out and get marketing insights and give us reports and tell us what the customers want, you know, web scraping and things like that, looking at reviews and all that. I mean, AI can do that, you know, instantly we can get our own AI and we can and that is something we can do today and go eliminate, you know, expense of, you know, external companies to go do this, which I mean, it might make folks mad that are that are out there that, you know, might be taking their job but. We are going to have to shift the way we think about work and we are going to be doing different types of work in the future, I think is what I think, Troy.

Sure. I even just looking at my small world of product development and designing product, there is going to be tools coming in like anytime where it just takes some of the mundane things that we do, you know, adding drafts to parts to make it manufacturable and things like that and stuff and yeah, that is good. We will not be doing that anymore very soon, I do not think.

I think even, you know, AI, you have to input all the information, right, so as it learns and if you look if you put all these different product development sort of statistics and things into AI, then it is I mean, I can see where it is going to help us like generate different concepts that we might not have followed before. I mean, it is it is a little bit scary in a way because I just, you know, I do not I do not want people to get away from using kind of our own minds and thinking, right? So we do not want you know, that is I think that is the downside, right, is that we want to keep our minds sharp and we do not want to let AI do everything for us, but I do like what you said about, you know, can we get to do some of the mundane things so we can use our minds to think about some of the more creativity and I mean, I think that is what gets people excited about their jobs in general, whether it is product development or some other type of job as well, right is to get excited about being creative and doing things different. You know, doing mundane things, nobody I do not think that excites I do not believe it does. I do not think that excites anyone, right? We want variety, you know, it is the spice of life is so to say, right, you want to you want to do things different so you can learn and evolve and, you know, become a better you know, better you.

Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. I who knows what will come of it, but I really hope it becomes a tool that we get to use and not just a replacement for us using our brains and being creative and, you know, and those kinds of things.

Yeah, we do not want to become you remember the movie Idiocracy, right? My wife and I was joke about that. You know, where we stopped thinking and then and that is not what we want, right? We want to evolve into better thinkers, not letting someone else do all the thinking for us, right?

Yeah. So reflecting on all the challenges that you have seen in the successes you have encountered developing products, what words of wisdom would you share with someone looking to make a significant impact in the product development world?

I think it is probably it is I use to something I said earlier, but I think do not let perfect get in the way of good as technical folks and engineers, right? We focus on what, you know, what does the customer really want and change as little as possible is needed to affect that change, right? So that will get you, I think the best result over time. Although again, as engineers, we like to change everything. And we also like to I use this analogy a lot. We try to make the round circle more round right? Once once it is round and you know, once it is wrong, we stop engineering it, right? So there comes a point when you get the product good enough and in the end. What I have learned is when you put a product out there and you think it is perfect, it is not because people are going to have feedback and you are going to make they are going to want things change anyway, so you are almost better off getting it out there faster getting the input, you know. Assuming, you know, of course, you get your quality right and everything, you do not want quality bills and things like that. You do not want to be doing that. You do not want to get things out so fast. You are like not look in quality but get the products out there. You know, get the feedback and evolve your products and and always be thinking about, okay, how can I make a better, you know, experience for the customer, right? Because nowadays what with all the you probably do the same thing. I look at ratings and I read all these reviews and people are so hypercritical there is so much information out there. You know, you got to be you got to be ready to make changes. You have got to be, you know, ready to evolve. We can not you can not just think because you put something out, it is just done, it is perfect, you have got to be able to think about, okay, how can I make this better? But you are not going to get that feedback until you get it out there. So if you wait all this time to get the product out, then you are missing all that feedback.

Sure. That that is good advice. Yeah, this has been great. Is there anything else you want to mention with regards to the product or product development in general?

I do not believe so. I really appreciate our conversation . I think this has been, you know, you know, a great a great discussion.

Yeah, this has been awesome. I normally would ask where people could go see this product, but it sounds like the best place would probably be like Homes or or Lowes or Home Depot or something like that, right, so?

Yeah, yeah, for this yeah, this 1 in particular, yeah, you could you could look at, you know, your home stores and you are going to see the product on shelf.

Okay, awesome. I really appreciate you doing this, Scott

Well, thank you. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me here.