Guerilla Product Development — A new approach to product development process stages
By: Ted Larson
Tags: Process, Consumer Electronics, Product Development, Robotics, Hardware Startup

Guerilla Product Development — A new approach to product development process stages Ted Larson Jan 6·20 min read

Photo by Piotr Wilk on Unsplash

In 1983, Jay Conrad Levinson published his influential book Guerilla Marketing. It was based on the concept of Guerilla warfare, which is using novel or unconventional methods to fight a war. Similarly, Levinson defined how one would use novel or unconventional techniques to promote or market products. I did not discover this amazing book until more than a decade later when I had my first start-up company and was looking for novel and inexpensive techniques to get the word out about my awesome products. The biggest concept from the book that resonated with me was this idea about strategic, targeted, eye-grabbing items that would cause a memorable experience where people were more likely to recommend your products or services via word of mouth.

Fast forward almost 25 years, and here I am running a Robotics and Consumer Electronics consultancy — OLogic — and some of these concepts resonate for me outside of marketing related tasks. I realized a while ago that this idea of targeted, unconventional techniques for product development is something we do every day at my company; we just hadn’t given it a label or a name. So, today, I am finally giving it a name, inspired by his book, and I am calling it Guerilla Product Development. In this article and a couple more to follow, I will outline some of the concepts of this technique of product development and give some specific examples of how we use these ideas in the development of Robotic and Consumer Electronic products.

Many of the items I am going to talk about here are things you may already know, as I have incorporated multiple different methodologies to optimize our own performance over the years. Perhaps I am just assigning new nomenclature, or semantic context, to terms you might know by other names. No matter what, this is the process I created and follow at OLogic. It has worked extremely well for us and maybe you will gain some insight and benefit in your own product development life by knowing the way I approach the problem.

In my time as the CEO of OLogic, I have seen many product failures, some of which I was involved in and some I was not. It feels more proactive to me to write an article on the things that will lead you to success, as opposed to the highly simplistic, “Don’t fail like these folks did!” Of course, all of these failures and successes have shaped my opinion on what you should or shouldn’t do during a product development cycle, and that’s what I would like to share.

Guerilla Marketing: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business

Introduction and Background

I have generally not been one to read a bunch of business books, and then follow their methods to the letter. Usually I am the type of person who forges their own path through painful trial-and error-experimentation, with a process to follow falling out logically at the end based on success or failure.

When I have fully decided that a result is worth getting I go ahead of it and make trial after trial until it comes. — Thomas Edison

Maybe you are this way, too? If you are, I think the items I will outline here will resonate with you. The bulk of what is contained in this article is just my advice. None of it is rule-of-law. My plan here is a series of articles to get through it all in bit-sized chunks. Having read through all the articles, if they help you to forge a better understanding of your own product path, then all the hard work it took to write the posts will be worth it!

One of my main principles in product development is to get to the essence of the product quickly, finding its unique or core value without spending a lot of time and money to see if it’s viable, and if it’s not, you must “cut bait,” leave, and move on. At OLogic, on a weekly basis, I encounter entrepreneurs with cool product concepts, and perhaps even a working prototype, that they are looking to take to market somehow. It blows my mind sometimes when I hear they have been at it for years, tinkering away in their garage. My usual advice here is

Fail quickly, if you are going to Fail

Move on to the next big idea quickly to find one that succeeds. You don’t want to waste two years or more of your life to fail later. This concept isn’t anything new or novel. I have seen it over and over, but I have been surprised at how many people don’t live it. It was ingrained in a book which is a must-read for any startup founder called The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

It is filled with not necessarily new business and engineering concepts, but re-frames them in a new way that has wider appeal in business circles. One heavily-used concept in the book, which now seems like de facto product development language, is the idea of the “MVP” or Minimally Viable Product. The book describes how the aim of any founder is to try to arrive at this product as quickly and cheaply as you can to enable the founder to obtain customer feedback/validation to understand whether the implementation is worthwhile. If you are contemplating doing a start-up company, this book is a must-read.

Last, you need to assume you are not going to follow-through on your first idea. Repetition makes things come as second nature. Don’t settle for your first idea. In the words of Conan the Barbarian

What does not kill you makes you strong!

If you are building a start-up company, make sure you have enough funds to not only follow-through on that first idea, but be able to make a left-turn during your product development cycle.

I think small startups tend to benefit most from this type of advice, especially those who have never built a hardware product before. However, you would be surprised at how often big brands don’t think things through when building new product concepts, and get stuck in the same places the small start-up’s do.

The Two Hemispheres of Product Development: There are two hemispheres of product development and you cannot get a product to market without them both. The first is product concept and design, and the second is implementation. My consultancy comes from the implementation side, not the design side. So take my advice with that in mind. Most of the time I get involved in a project if the design side is incomplete, or un-implementable, I have to go back and help the customer fix it before they can move forward with the implementation.