174: Agile Product Development & Additive Manufacturing

May 4, 2023

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Jon Hirschtick is the co-founder of both Solidworks and OnShape. In his 42 years of building these platforms, his software has been used to design more physical consumer products than anything else on earth. OnShape alone has over 3 million designers on the CAD software platform. Today Jon is going to share some valuable knowledge for inventors, startups, and small manufacturers on why agile product development is so important for hardware startups, what additive manufacturing can do to facilitate agile development, and how modern tools are making it easier than ever to get to market faster, at higher quality, and iteratively.

Today you will hear us talk about:

The Story of Solidworks and Onshape
Learned at an early age on how to treat customers right
Agile design
Build hardware the way you build software a little bit, using an agile process for produce development.
Work in a series of design sprints, with the end of each sprint developing a product.
Daily stand up meetings.
Agile Manifesto online.
Jon is publishing a whitepaper on Agile development
May 15-18 is the liveworks conference.
Why agile now, 4 reasons. Software is joining with hardware. The upcoming workforce is naturally agile thinkers. The world is changing constantly. The tools are now here for agile.
The great products are now being made by startups, or big companies want to work like startups.
Real time collaboration.
Additive manufacturing is changing rapidly every year
3d Printing conventions are powerful for seeing what is possible.
Software now is innovative, fast, reliable.
The issue of version history and files.
Cloud native is the key to modern CAD design tools.
Collaboration can now happen in real time, with edit history, on any device, anywhere.
Software can now have clear traceable rigor and feature logging which is very important when you are going from prototyping, to short run manufacturing, to full scale manufacturing.

EPISODE LINKS:

Jon Hirschtick Links:

LinkedIn | LiveWorx 2023 | Onshape

The Product Startup Podcast Links:

https://www.ProductStartup.com/

Mako Design Links:

https://www.makodesign.com/

Kevin Mako Links:

Instagram | LinkedIn | Quora | Facebook | Twitter

Partner: PTC’s best-in-class software solutions Onshape: The only cloud-native product development platform that delivers full-featured computer-aided design (CAD), integrated product data management (PDM) and enterprise analytics in a single system, and Creo: 3D CAD solution that provides designers with the most innovative tools to build better products faster, such as generative design, additive manufacturing, real-time simulation, IIoT, and augmented reality.

Producer: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop-shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and manufacturing services. To assist our startup and inventor clients, in addition to above, we help with business strategy, product strategy, marketing, and sales/distribution for all consumer product categories.