The Way of Product with Caden Damiano #154 Tactics for Product Launch Success & The Hidden Secrets of Making Products that "Just Work" w/ Dan De Mars, Head of Product at Current Backyard
Most teams aren’t doing the work to make a product launch successful.
They’re pontificating in conference rooms. Debating specs. Trying to intellectually arrive at the right answer.
The work looks different. The work looks different.
Like Steve Jobs said,
“There’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product… Designing a product is keeping 5,000 things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways… And it’s that process that is the magic.”
It looks like Dan De Mars and his team at Current Backyard are cooking 500 pizzas in two weeks. Prototyping. Testing with real data. Seeing if they can actually deliver before promising anything to the public.
Crust thickness. Topping load. Heat curves. App guidance. Mouthfeel. Every variable they could isolate became another run, another data point, another step toward something that felt right—not just something that looked good in a deck.
This is what intentional design actually looks like.
Dan, head of product at Current Backyard ↗, doesn’t believe in perfection out of the gate. He believes in creating the conditions where a team can learn fast, fail often, and use their collective taste to sort signal from noise.
The result? An electric pizza oven that lets a first-timer cook restaurant-quality pizza without the friction, the learning curve, or the open flame.
But the insight goes beyond pizza ovens.
Great products feel inevitable from the outside because teams did unreasonable amounts of work on the inside. They ran tight feedback loops. They invited more eyes. They treated taste as a filter over hundreds of experiments, not a single flash of genius.
Dan also talks about designing for “limited grillers”—urban dwellers constrained by space, fire restrictions, or time—who still want great food without the heroics. It’s a masterclass in finding underserved segments and building for real constraints.
If you’ve ever wondered how “it just works” products come together, this conversation is the blueprint.
Listen on Apple Podcasts ↗ or Spotify ↗
Links
00:00 The Essence of Design
01:17 The Journey of a Designer
02:17 Philosophy of Design
03:25 Unlearning and Relearning
09:44 Innovating Outdoor Cooking
18:41 Targeting the Modern Cook
25:56 Innovative Launches and Product Expansion
26:52 Competing with Convenience: The Pizza Oven
28:26 Designing for User Experience
31:05 Prototyping and Iteration Process
34:31 Balancing Functionality and Aesthetics
44:29 Final Thoughts and Future Directions
Get full access to The Way of Product w/ Caden Damiano at www.wayofproduct.com/subscribe