EPISODE 25 - KEVIN DAKAN

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 a guest who has led engineering teams for brands such as Nerf, SuperSoaker, PlayDoh, Baby Alive, FurReal, and more.

Kevin Dakan grew up outside of New York City. He had a passion for tinkering that started early when he would play with Transformers and then go home to make them out of Legos. He went to school in Buffalo, New York where he completed his degree in mechanical engineering. His first job out of school was for Fisher Price which launched a career and passion for consumer products, particularly toys.

In his free time, Kevin is a passionate sailboat racer, and met his wife while racing in the northeast. Kevin is currently looking forward to his next opportunity and excited to bring his passion for people and consumer centric innovation to his next endeavor.

In our conversation, we discussed the development of the Nerf Ultra and a new material technology that was introduced with the product. We also discussed some of the drawbacks of computer simulation and a product failure they found during physical testing that  they would never have found in a simulation because it was not a part of their model setup. Finally we talk about the importance of boldness and innovation in product development.

Join us as we dive into some of the ins and outs of developing toys for a large market.

Show Notes:

Podcast Transcript:

Hey Kevin welcome to the show

How are you doing pleasure to meet you

Glad you are here so i start this off all the time i tell everybody that i started impulse 26 years ago i worked for another product development company that had all facets of product development under 1 roof kind of saw the writing on the wall that they were not going to be in it for the long haul so i left and started impulse how did you get into product development

I got into product development i had really a passion for engineering and solving problems very early i used to go to my friend's house and play with transformers and then go back to my house and make them out of legos so you know that really inspired me to get into the field of engineering and and fixing problems so that really led me into the product development world you know i like the pace of product development i like the challenge of it every single year you know you get to work on something that is kind of you know an improvement or a new product every year you are not working on something that just takes 347 years to get through the pipeline so i really like the energy of consumer products the ability to kind of you know learn on the fly and take what you know and and and apply it right away into the product you see it is very tangible at the when you are done you get to go to a shelf and see what you work on and tell your friends about it you know you do not get to say hey i insta installed this little widget into a space shuttle and you know 20 years later you might might might might have heard of it so i like the pace i like the the adventure i like the ability to kind of like get in there and learn every single day

Yeah yeah yeah getting to see your stuff on stuff that you have helped design on the shelf is pretty rewarding kind of thing you just walk down the store and go hey we did that yeah my wife and i were just at costco this past weekend i am like we did that i did not know they were selling it here so that is kind of yeah that is mine.

Yep yep yeah

So cool so tell us about the products you want to talk about today like why you chose it some of the the features about it

Yeah so i am going to talk about a product line that i developed as part of the nerf line it is called nerf ultra this product is was really innovative when it came out you know there is a lot of challenges that the the brand was overcoming like you know we run it up performance and make a better product and take everything we have learned over the last you know 1015 years and and come up with a new projectile that was an improvement that really helped that was tougher that was you know worked better that really excited our consumers so i want to talk about the nerf ultra line what it took to get that to the marketplace we launched with 1 blaster the first year and then followed up with a whole bunch the year after so it was a pretty exciting product development process to get that off the ground

Cool so tell us some of the key features or the innovations that differentiate it from other things we might see in the market or some things people might not realize just by looking at the product on the shelf

Yeah i think the biggest innovation was actually a material innovation you know we had been looking at ways to improve our dart performance and we would come up with all sorts of different solutions we had rival a couple of years earlier which was a ball which is a whole different geometry we had done a disk which shot really well but we were not able to improve on the actual dart itself the dart itself had sort of been settled for probably a good decade or so and our competitors were using the same platform the same dart so it you know it really kind of was just the clean x of the dark world and you know we really wanted to get out there and say how do we make improvements to this space so this you know it started with a material renovation right how do we go through and really find a new material that was stronger that was like lighter that got us more performance and that was the big breakthrough is finding material that met that criteria and then we needed new mechanisms in order to utilize that material we can take what we learned from all the previous blasts we have done with the same launch max but we now had to come up with new geometry in order to detect if that was the right dart in the blaster and use that geometry to come up with new mechanisms to detect and make sure that everything was was functioning the way it was supposed to made sure that we did not have darts or other projects or batteries or anything else that you wanted that could possibly get stuck in there and develop a whole new family of mechanisms around that and so once we are able to get the material sorted out get the mechanism sorted out then we charge forward with how do we present a brand new product to the marketplace and create value for our consumer

Cool i guess a simple question is what was the material was it just something that was laying around there or was it some kind of concoction you guys had to come up with to develop

So the original dart was an extrude polyethylene it is pretty standard polyethylene is that pool noodle stuff right so it is very very inexpensive to produce but it is also pretty soft so the material we found was expanded bead polypropylene so if you know expanded b like you know it is the styrofoam you found in packaging and most of this dio from you found in packaging it like sort of deteriorates really quickly it is like you kind of shake it or rub it all of a sudden the beads are falling off and going everywhere and so we found a version of that material which held together really well it was used in car seats or car interiors bumpers a lot of automotive applications for it so the process was brand new to us it was not an extrusion it was a injection molded steamed bead process which was really neat and so we had to figure out throughout and how are we going to translate that to our world right you know are we going to individually injection mold a dart where we are going to machine them out of a phone block like what were the the you know how are you going to take this this material technology and turn it into the product we needed and there was a lot of a lot of gaps to overcome you know the vendor we partnered to to help us solve this again they were doing like big cars you know the back of a car and so to do an individual dart was a huge stretch for them and so you know how do you tool this how do you plan your production tool how do you make it so that you have consistency from from cavity to cavity these are all things we had to learn and overcome so the material itself was really really really interesting to learn about how it was made what the limitations were what the variations within it where you can have different bead sides you can have different like you know sort of cooking and steaming times and temperatures so that you can really affect the the material performance through some of these other factors and so we had to learn about this process we really liked the material because of its strength and its durability and so we we liked that it gave us a performance advantage it gave us a new dart that was not going to get you know stepped down and squished if anybody have any any darts in their house or in their backyard you know those things get destroyed almost immediately so we are really excited about the potential and so much of the challenge was trying to figure out like you know how do you make these

Sure it sounds like you ended up injection molding it how big of a how many cavities did you end up doing do you remember

So we wanted to maximize cavitation as much as possible the tool bases that we are using were like meter and a half or almost 2 m by 2 m really big tool bases so you know our cavitation wound up being like 96 cavities or something you know very very different than injection molding plastic parts you know you are trying to get the beads distributed in there evenly and then you are trying to build out your cavitation so you can get the steam distributed evenly and that took protocols that took experimentation and that took us you know a couple of versions before we even got to sort of the high capacity production tool

Wow yeah wow. Sure sure backing up just a little bit then so we we have helped us to develop thousands of products and every 1 of those development journeys is different so kind of walk us through the the whole development process what were all the steps involved in getting the product to market

Yeah you know basically we will break it down in sort of 3 major chunks right there is the the r d phase the you know what is possible a kind of phase right the you know the product development phase and then they go get it done phase so in the r d phase you know we have had a pretty wide r d effort had been ongoing for years and so once we decided that this was a new path we are going to go down you know we zeroed in on some of the solutions that we had been exploring and sort of bubbled up the top candidates so that we can do a sort of deeper feasibility review of those top candidates and that included the expanded bead foam that we found as well as other solutions that were that had had been bubbled up so the r d efforts were were a really big part of this puzzle and a lot of that stemmed from you know sort of the ability to build out a mechanism and material team which is something we did not have a decade earlier so you know you know earlier in my development through working with this brand i recognize that if we are going to innovate if we are going to get ahead of our competition here we need the right staff in order to put all this out there so you know it was a big challenge for this team that we had built they had you know a couple of years of experience at this point and so now we had the tools and the people in place to be able to do an effort like this so the r d effort was was ongoing and included you know finding vendors who can get into this into the spaces of the materials we are looking at of establishing those vendor relationships prototyping and prot tooling with these vendors once we sort of had an idea of what was possible possible then we need to turn it into what is the product offering you know what are we actually going to do with this new this new projectile this new dart are we going to make a you know a really big premium you know t v advertisable item are we going to make you know a more achievable like you know 15 $20 you know this is something i am just going to go get day and day out kind of item and those choices kind of led us to the the first item we did for this product line we called it you know very very creative ultra 1 and then eventually we had ultra 2 and ultra 3 and you know it got pretty confusing once you got past like 5 or 6 but it was a new a new product to the marketplace so we wanted to come up with a new design language a new visual language around it you know a new aesthetic so you know while we were working on the materials and the mechanism our design partners were really doing a deep ex exploration as far as the ideation and visual language that we can work with and you know that is how product development happens right you know it is like you have all the disciplines in your product development team and they each do their exploration marketing is looking for the right marketing insights designs looking for the right visual language and sort of form factors that make sense and you know we in the engineering side are looking for new materials and new mechanisms and proving all that out together so once we got into defining what the item is and aligning on it with management you know then it is it is you start going full speed ahead you know you get your vendors involved you start quoting your item you negotiate you you do internal negotiations you do external negotiations and then you know you get to the right right place you know i like to call that cost of feature alignment rather than beating up vendors i find that our vendors are our partners and i want to with them i want to understand what their cost structures are so that we can choose the right features that matter the most to our consumers and we drove that process for this product we are able to kind of take that and build out you know the cost options and and really understand what aesthetic upgrades we can make as well as us what new mechanism upgrades we needed so that we had a product that met a price point that would would really work for our consumers so once we got into sort of the the final leg of development we you know prototyped our individual our actual product you know we built off of the bread boards we had built earlier we built off of the learnings that we had through each cycle of of prototyping darts prototyping launch platforms combining them into an aesthetic platform that turned into our sort of like works like looks like like model which we then refine further to tool models and tool patterns and then you know you tool it up you debug it you have failures and debug you go back to the drawing board you fix the failures you move forward you get the product launched we did have a lot of challenges and debug with this you know when you have a brand new material a brand new projectile as you can imagine like you know there is a lot you do not know so you have got to learn what you do not know and you know we were pretty deep into this process when we started finding quality failures in a way we did not expect so that was a big piece of our discovery here is you know how do you take this quality failure our our darts were breaking off when you hit them out like a very specific angle the dark tips were breaking off and it was something that were like you know kind of take that step back and say i want likely is it that consumers are going to do this and the answer is it is probable you know it is it is likely to happen so we had to go back and sort of re evaluate everything we have learned so we went through back and readjusted the formula of the actual material we adjusted the molding process we came up with something that was a little different in its structure so it hold together better you know so instead of having break along a particular bead we try to get more beads in there so we wound up with like a smaller bead that allowed us to have a little bit more structure through through critical corners and geometries and then we had to redo our mechanism redo our performance expectations redo our cost modeling you know redo our you know if we go back and kind of write refine everything we had done because we had new input new information and new lessons that we had to now deploy into our final product once we got all that figured out we launched the product and and you know hope hope it does well in the marketplace you know it was it was really new and exciting and a pretty sizable innovation that that we were able to bring to the marketplace

Yeah what was the timeline like to get everything done

So as i mentioned like sort of the r d piece was ongoing and then once we put sort of dropped it out of the the blue sky world into here is what we really need to do that is probably about a year until we were ready to turn it into a product offering once we were ready to turn it into a product offering and figure out okay this is what it is going to be this is the season we are going to launch that was about a year and a half of actual you know finalizing development negotiations tooling debug production etc

Yeah yeah you mentioned prototyping a lot what like was it all like threed printed prototypes or did you do bridge tooling or like what did that look like.

It was a combination of a lot of different options early in the game we tend to do a combination of 3D 3D printing s l and sls and sort of benchmark or you know a lot of times we will actually use c and c to machine out the parts that we are expecting to put in there because depending on the material they could be more durable or a better finished than what you you would get out of the 3D printed part so it would be a combination of benchmark machining threed printed you know hand assembly hand hand tweaking to kind of get to the models that you were working with so the more refined the product the more you are able to just print off what you needed in order to get to your model you know when it is when it is early development your bread boards do not have a shell they do not have a housing or if they do it is like this big block brick you know that says you know black box stuff going on in here and so in a lot of what is going on in there can be you know machine gears and and hand hand tweaked linker linkages and levers a lot of times we will scalp parts from other products that exist you know if it is if we are doing a launcher that uses 2 wheels to launch the dart you know we had those you know so we could take that plastic assembly and then readjust the spacing between the wheels and utilize parts that already exist you know so you know we can keep kind of kit basher away into into some of that early development again once you get up the tool ready you know you are you are doing a lot of machining of the parts direct directly to make sure that they are absolutely working in the right the right materials and in this case we did a lot of protocoling especially on the projectile itself 1 of the technologies that we started using around this time was steel printed or centered tools so that we can proto tool our injection molded tools run them in a small scale shop environment in order to get get the you know get materials that you could not print right so the dark tip e.g. was a was a great e.g. that we wound up proto tooling tiny little molds in order to injection mold dart tips because it had a very specific compliance and softness and geometry that you needed you could not threed print that you know you could not get the right softness by the threed print technologies we had and so that was a huge huge iteration process you know i used to you know i have done darts earlier in my career and it would be like a 3 month cycle to get a new dart tip because you design it you would send it to vendor they would actually like you know machine a tool in you know in a month or so and you know by the time they ran it and got you parts it was like 3 months later so your your iteration cycle was only you know what 3 for a year once we got to injection molding our own r p injection molded tools and can run it in our own lab we were down to like a week or 2 so you could constantly innovate and iterate on on in small injection multi parts like that and that allowed us to get like all these different variants of dark tips in combination with our with the the experimental tools we had to do with the body just to figure out the manufacturing process so that was really really helpful to be able to change and iterate and use these r p technologies to to really understand what the product off offering was going to be and what the variations were and then it came down to like lots of testing you know lots of shooting down the hallway and telling people what run run run so we can we can measure performance and really understand what we had with all these different variations and understand what the impact was you know if you tweak your dark tip shape a little bit to make it more accurate does it make it shoot further we kind of found that there was this balance between you know different factors just by the geometry of the dart tip you know so that that informed our understanding of what was possible with dart so we can continue to innovate in future projects and once you get into to you know the the tool ready models again like you needed to have really good robust ability to prototype in order to you know have it function with the with the loads that you are looking at you know so if you have a piston blaster you know you need to put the actual spring in there you need materials that are strong enough to withstand exactly like your injection molding materials are going to withstand and so that was again a combination of like you know nylon sintering and just physically machining parts that were the right dimension if they could physically be machine you know some of them can only be injection molded so we did some proto tooling of actual internal components as we move forward you know that becomes an important step and then you know eventually you know you run into your production tools and then you are just debugging your production tools what i can say is 1 thing we do did not really use is we did not really use simulation software like finite element analysis or anything like that because we found that it took us longer to do the simulation then it would to just build it and see it in the in the real stuff and so you could spend a month doing a simulation but then it is only as good as the inputs of the simulation it is not as good as actually having a physically injected molded part which fails in the real world you know like the failure i described earlier where the dark tips were breaking off i do not think we would have ever come up with that in simulation you know it it is possible you know but we would have had to have simulated that particular angle of attack in our in our in our process and because it was an angle of attack we were not planning or predicting we probably would not have simulated it in which case we would not have discovered the failure until when we discovered it anyway and then the amount of time and effort and cost it would to do the simulation you know it becomes becomes lost becomes lost to the product

Yeah yeah yeah i found that people will ask us a lot to do simulations and i am like we can do it but remember this is only giving you a feel good right like confidence to go ahead and build the tool because until you get actual parts you do not you will not know for sure so yeah that is that is really interesting and like you said you would not have found that that breakage in a simulation you were not thinking about

No no not unless you simulate it right not unless that becomes part of your model to try and try to simulate so you know the thing with simulations is it is only as good as the input you have right you know we are we are not dealing with homogeneous material we are dealing with expanded beads so it had like every single bead had his own structure and then the adhesion from b to bad had a structure and so you know how are you going to be able to simulate that in a a computer in a computer model like that the amount of detail you need for that + the variation you get from from be layout to bead layout so if you if you have happen to have 2 beads that are directly on a corner they are going to tear apart right but if you happen to get the beads packed in a particular mold where the bead can kind of stretch over a corner you are not going to have failure in that same spot so that is a technology and technique we rarely used you know sometimes we will do like a mold flow analysis to see if like there is a particular part that might get a little weak even that took a couple weeks and often i was faster to just just tool apart and see what failed you know so you know i would say that we have looked into that you know we have spent years trying to say hey how do we learn how to do this faster and i think the answer is you just do it faster

Yeah yeah so tell us a little bit about the team involved how many people what were their roles

So it was a it was a pretty sizable team i was a senior director at the time so i had a manager and a part product engineer on the product development side i also had my mechanism and material team who had a manager and somebody find and we wound up dividing and conquering right so because we are doing such a broad r d effort we pulled in other folks other engineers from other parts of our team to focus on particular r d efforts and so that sort of gave us just the bandwidth to be able to dive into some of this so you know like 1 person was assigned to the expanded bead we had a different person assigned to a different technology that we are fleshing out so that we can you know get more points of view and a creative look to it so it was it was a pretty sizable team like i said you know i was leading probably 4 or 5 people directly on the project on top of of project managers you know we had our designers our marketers our you know our rest of our development team we partnered with legal very closely throughout this whole process because we are looking to you want to avoid what was out in the marketplace but also come up with geometries that were unique and could be protectable so a lot of that work was was pretty bad against the team so that was on the domestic side so we also had our partners in asia that are part of our company as well as the individual vendors we had our production vendors we had our sub suppliers and contractors so the the the produce that the the outfit that produced the darts was a subcontractor and all they did was darts that is it and then we brought that to a production vendor who then did the dart assembly did the dar art tip did the blaster assembly put it all together on top of all the other subcontractors we had so you know reaching out and being a part of a subcontractor development team was reasonably new for us you know usually our vendors would would be doing that kind of work and so that was a big step so it took a lot of a lot of feet on the ground you know 1 of the things that was a little bit unique about this project is it turned out we did not have enough feet on the ground to to make this this happen and is on the time span we needed so you know kind of midstream i had to take a borrow from 1 of the talents from 1 of my other teams and get them involved in order to help drive this forward in order to get the focus because there were so many pieces to the puzzle to sort of to keep pushing together you know i had to like you know do some resource planning you know within my broader organization in order to make it all happen and so that is that is part of you know what it takes to lead a project like this is is recognize you know like i need a little bit more horsepower here you you know where can i get some help you know what what are the priorities across the entire organization and how do i deploy my resources to get done what we need to get done

Sure sure you may have already answered this but with with all the products impulses helped developed there is always some kind of challenge that comes up so what was the biggest challenge for this product and how did you solve it

I will kind of there is you know before we talked about some of the challenges already i think 1 of the early big challenges was just figuring out what material you were going to go with you know because you know when you get into sort of material research like this you can very quickly get down these rabbit holes where you have a promising material but it is just the technology is not ready or the production is not ready and you know you how much are you going to invest to help that technology production get ready is that something you are going to do are you going to wait for the the material supplier to develop and figure figured out so you know making those decisions early on as to like what were we going to chase i think was probably 1 of the the biggest early challenges with a project like this you know so once we settled on this expanded foam technology there was still a lot of questions you know like we mentioned like do you machine it you know that was an option you know you just take a big block of foam and you just start machining all these things you know but is that scalable is that something you can do in for in production do you do you compression mold and form it right you know that is a technology we have used for a lot of our other phones you know you basically take a small block and squeeze it down compress and mold it you know obviously we were looking for the lightest possible so maybe compression molding was not going to be the right technology but we explored all of that and i think you know the other major challenge we had was you know getting alignment on the product itself you know we were looking for a new and unique design language in aesthetic which added a lot of cost to the product so you know throughout our negotiating phase we kind of got to this crunch time where it is like you know we just were not aligned on our own team as to where the priorities were so you know i kind of had to sort of help the team get to a place where we stripped out all the aesthetic language just to get to a base product cost and get the vendor moving and then build the aesthetic with the budget we had left and so and so we can still get to that unique or a unique aesthetic language but still get to the product we needed so you know the challenge to get through that process through our our cost of feature alignment was a big piece of the puzzle and i think think you know again we mentioned a little bit about the failures we had latent in development that was that was a huge challenge because by then you are in crunch time right you know you have got shipping dates you have got you know walmart and target orders that you have got to meet and they are only you know weeks to months away you know so how do you react to the failures and how do you course correct and manage expectations. All at the same time becomes a huge challenge the closer you are to production you know the less the less freedom you have got to make choices you know as a as a product development i am sure you feel that every day and so you know how are we able to rally the team the vendors redefine our marketing expectations in some cases redefine our costing expectations and do that quickly you know how much of how much unraveling did we have time to do you know you could not go back and come up with a brand new material that it was just going to take too long i was you know that was an option we talked about it right you know is this the right material are we going to be able to get there with this material so it kind of came down to how do you how do you take the knowledge you have gained from working with this material for the last year and come up with a formulation a geometry a version of it you know is it something you have to adjust tools or make new tools or you know is it just a formulation adjustment so there is sort of different steps and tiers of damage control that you need to work through and and make some really tough decisions along the way ultimately i think that the challenge with this particular product was the overall cost structure it wound up being a premium item in marketplace which did not did not command of the the increase in performance that we we thought it would so ultimately if i was to do this over i would probably make it cheaper yeah i would be focused on having a a product offering that was that resonated with our consumers that the performance was worth the value because the performance was there it performed better but it did not perform many many many dollars better so to me i think that was the big lesson that out of this particular product line is you know the the foaming technology we developed wound up not being as cost effective as ex extruded polyethylene it costs more per dart and when you want to have a product with lots of darts those tiny tiny little differences really make a big difference in what you can offer on the product at the end

Swiching gears just a little bit as we start to wrap up what are some of the trends that you see kind of emerging in product development

In product development i would say the ability to to prototype and learn and fail quickly you know as that accelerates as you can get into proto tooling and prototype tooling you can learn on the real stuff so much faster than ever before i think that is 1 of the biggest things that in product development you know you know we are getting close to the place where you can you can 3D print your product for production you know that is nearly there you know like we are doing that with decoration where your your you know your your ink jet printing directly onto your finished goods you know you are pretty close to being able to r p finished goods which really is going to help save all that tooling time and the tooling investment you know i think that is going to be the big next leap in product development is is how do you avoid the the high investment to build tools if you have these technologies that you can just print your product so to me that is where the future is i am pretty excited when we when we get to that place from a business standpoint i think the challenges are very different you know because it is so much easier to generate and ia8 and get products out the door these days you know it is a lot and you have got a distribution channel like amazon it is really easy to come in and knock off the best product there is entire companies that are built around the idea of fast follow where they can very quickly come in and and create a very similar experience you know for a lot less so that is a really big you know change in the business the fact that like our the retail partners are very much involved in developing product for their own channel that is sort of like all of the base product within their portfolio you know and that happens across across multiple channels right you know walmart does a target it does it you know office supply companies are doing it they are coming up with their own version of all the basics that they need to sell so that you know their their cost structure is more directly linked to buying from a vendor and selling at a at a at the at the profits they are looking for so that is another big challenge in the in in this industry in particular but i think a lot of industries

Sure sure reflecting on all the challenges and successes you have had over the years what words of wisdom would you share with somebody looking to make a significant impact in the product development world

You know i think being guided by consumer insight is a huge huge huge piece of the puzzle you have to do what consumers want but you also have to be bold enough to come up with ideas that consumers need that do not know they want it yet and so how how bold do you be i think is the biggest question for product developers and that is really the question that needs to be answered like consumers can really attach it to a an inc mental improvement something they understand + something that makes it a better product for them they they they are sometimes they can be really fickle when it comes to those those innovation leaps right you know you look back to the the ipod back in the day right you know there were mp 3 players that were out in the marketplace prior to apple coming out with the ipod but the ipod itself was such a unique consumer experience that that is what propelled an entire technology forward right and so you know as a product developer you need to understand where your consumer is today where you can take them and and then how do you step them to that place through incremental products incremental offerings or a message where they can wrap their head around what you are offering and why is it better than what else is out there

Yeah that is good stuff awesome this has been great before we finish is there anything else you would like to mention with regards to the product or product development in general

No not really i think like you know product development is exciting you know it is like it builds on especially consumer product development i kind of talked about you know the inability to use simulation and modeling software like that is a different kind of engineering to me like you know the consumer product and a lot of product development that is so consumer focused and so reactive to a consumer experience you know you got to build from your gut and your experience and your wisdom you know i would say like you know wisdom is the thing you get right after you need it and i feel like you know that is a bit of product development it is like you know the best product developers are the ones who have the experience to have already implemented those lessons learned right into the product right after from the get go

Yeah good good stuff kevin i appreciate you doing this

Yeah it is great to talk to you and you know always love to share those experiences and see if anybody can gain something from it

Yeah yeah thanks again