David Kelley, founder and CEO of IDEO Product Development, grew up in Ohio, where he survived on a diet of Velveeta cheese and white bread, He attended Carnegie Mellon and studied electrical engineering, but spent more time working on carnival floats. After graduation, he worked for Boeing on the 747. He learned early that in a large company, he didn't get to choose the people he worked with. He came to the Graduate Product Design Program at Stanford, where he discovered his passion-design. His first company was called the Intergalactic Destruction Company. One of the things he learned in graduate school was that you can use design in any situation in life.
Kelley explains that he has a unique perspective on starting companies-his goal is not growth, but to create a personal gratification system. A place where he can work with friends. He explaines that many of his comments on starting a company may not apply to companies that are trying to grow as fast as possible.
Kelley describes three important steps in starting a company: 1) Follow your passion 2) Hire great people 3) Focus on process. His passion is design, but there must be a balance between passion and business issues. People often worry too much about the financial side of the company and fail on the emotional side of the company, he says.
Kelley further describes his passion and what design means to him. He describes design as a process of having a combination of ideas in the head that need to be organized, while making a leap of faith about how it will be presented. It is a totally enjoyable experience, he says, there's a zen moment where time goes by and you lose track of everything. He presents a few design projects, including Personal Sky, SpyFish and weather-related inventions.
Kelley believes that you should not take a conventional approach to hiring people and building teams. He offers up a few suggestions including: 1) Hire individuals or non-confomists to stimulate the organization 2) Hire a diverse range of experts and generalists in different fields 3) Form hotgroups of 8-12 people. He mentions the benefits of having close ties with your local reputable university to source out the best potential staff. To Kelley, an ideal hire interacts well with established IDEO staff, and demonstrates an attitude of wisdom: he/she strikes a good balance between their ability to promote their ideas yet welcome constructive criticism. IDEO has slowly grown from a staff of 2 to 430, he notes.
Kelley believes that you need a language, a process and a framework in order to design. He stresses that experience is key success factor: learn from all the projects you've worked on, distil the knowledge and apply it to your future projects. He recommends reading The Art of Innovation for IDEO's concept of a great process.
Kelley talks about how the observation phase is the most overlooked part of the development process. Kelley hires social scientists to watch people complete tasks instead of asking them usability questions. He prefers to see them as customers instead of users and strongly believes that customer satisfaction comes with understanding their values. He gives examples of how his team will observe a customer in their usual environment instead of inviting them into a sterile lab for product testing. The case studies he presents include a television remote control.
Kelley believes you start to think about things completely different when you think your job is to design the experience of using the device as opposed to designing the device itself. Kelley feels that to captivate an audience you need to build a context around the technology you are marketing and take into consideration how outside factors will affect how your product is perceived. He uses methods of transportation as an example
Kelley believes that how quickly you create an initial prototype is directly proportional to how successful a product will be. Essentially, given a set project deadline, the earlier you invite feedback, the more chances you have to revise and improve. He calls this "enlightened trial and error."
Kelley narrates his experience prototyping the Apple and the Microsoft mice.
Follow your passion, hire great people, and focus on process, says Kelley
Kelley begins by joking that in current times, an individual or business that shows up with the promise of cash is a customer of IDEO. He recounts a previous client categorization schematic IDEO employed to color-code their clients. He also emphasises the importance of taking on balanced projects which pay well, are innovative and of interest to his designers.