Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S7E16 Chad Walters | Constraints, Iteration, & Industrial Design in Product Development
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Chad Walters is an experienced product design leader with more than two decades of experience developing complex products across healthcare, life sciences, aerospace, defense, and commercial markets. As the first industrial designer at a major engineering-focused design center in the Raleigh-Durham area, Chad helped establish and grow a strong user-centered design presence within an organization traditionally driven by engineering and manufacturing excellence.
Throughout his career, Chad has led multidisciplinary teams in the development of products ranging from large-scale interactive vending systems like the Coca-Cola Freestyle to advanced surgical robotics platforms and handheld CPR coaching devices. His work goes far beyond surface-level aesthetics — focusing on defining product behavior, reducing usability risk, and ensuring that form, function, and brand identity work together to support both user needs and business outcomes.
A passionate mentor, Chad has also served as a long-time Product Development Advisor to biomedical engineering and entrepreneurship students at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University. In this role, he guides multidisciplinary student teams through the realities of product development — helping them structure teams, build compelling business cases, refine investor pitches, and understand the importance of being the best storytellers in the room.
Earlier in his career, Chad led design teams developing aftermarket performance components for Audi, Volkswagen, and Porsche vehicles at APR, LLC, where he combined engineering rigor with brand storytelling and public-facing product launches. He began his professional journey designing avionics control systems at Archangel Systems, Inc. and contributed to professional-grade kitchen equipment development at Viking Range, LLC — experiences that shaped his ability to bridge mechanical engineering, user interface design, and human-centered product strategy.
Chad holds a degree in Industrial Design from Auburn University and an associate’s degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Wallace Community College. His career reflects a rare blend of technical fluency, design leadership, and deep empathy for end users — all aimed at creating products that perform at the highest level while genuinely improving the human experience.
LINKS:
Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chadwaltersid/
Aaron Moncur, host
Subscribe to the show to get notified so you don't miss new episodes every Friday.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment like cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us at www.teampipeline.us
Watch the show on YouTube: www.youtube.com/@TeamPipelineus
If I just roll in and say, here's what I think we should do. We should do this. Trust me like that's not a story. That's you trusting me. Now maybe we've worked together forever and you just trust anything I say, and that's fine, but that's generally not the case. You need to lead them to the solution. So you need to tell them the story of what you did.
Aaron Moncur:Hello and welcome to the being an engineer podcast today, we're joined by Chad Walters, a seasoned industrial designer with over two decades creating impactful designs that foster empathy for users. His career has been built on close collaboration with engineering teams and clients worldwide, delivering innovative solutions that meet the complex needs of both the users and the business. For the last 19 years, he's been primarily focused on med devices as a global consultant in the EMS industry. Chad, thanks a lot for being with us today.
Chad Walters:Thanks, Aaron. I'm looking forward to conversation.
Aaron Moncur:So most of our guests are engineers. You are a industrial designer, product designer, product developer. And work with a lot of engineers, and we haven't had too many industrial designers on on the show, so I'm excited to dig into this with you and hear your perspectives and how you work with engineers, and how you wish engineers would work better with you. So before we do that, we're going to do some rapid fire questions and help all of the audience get to know you quickly. So I'm going to give you a question. We'll do four of these, and just give me the first response that comes to mind. No need to think very deeply about these. Here we go. First one. If you could have dinner with any engineer or designer in history, who would it be?
Chad Walters:Terrible with specific names? I'm going to go with a discipline. I feel like I have so much fun talking to mechanical engineers, so I think I'd want to spend dinner, a nice, long dinner, and maybe a couple of drinks with mechanical engineer. I think we'd have a lot to talk about,
Aaron Moncur:Nice, okay, Linux, Mac, OS or Windows.
Chad Walters:That's a tough one. You might expect as a designer, it would be Mac, but work my entire career has been working with engineers, and kind of makes it tough. So my preference, my language that I speak, is Windows.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, that does surprise me. I thought it would be Mac. I will
Chad Walters:say that I've moved over to iPhone, sort of kicking and screaming. So we're still trying to figure out our relationship. After being Android for so long,
Aaron Moncur:you know, long ago, I tried to get into Mac. I was doing photography and web design, and I thought, well, clearly I'm supposed to be on Mac OS for those things. And I tried it, and I just, I couldn't get used to it. But I've used an iPhone for, I don't know, 15 years now. That's been no problem, but the Mac OS, I just it didn't resonate with me. Okay, let's see, would you rather solve one hard problem or 10 easy ones?
Chad Walters:I think I'd want to, if there were no time constraints, I think I'd want to solve one hard problem.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, and last one, if product design had a superpower, what would it be?
Chad Walters:Meeting a need? I would say
Aaron Moncur:that's deceptively difficult to do, isn't it?
Chad Walters:Yeah, that's the hard problem to solve,
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, all right, that gets us through our rapid fire questions. Thank you for participating there. So let's jump into the standard interview. And I always like to ask guests the the first question, what? What made you decide to get into what you're doing, industrial design, product design?
Chad Walters:Yeah, I would say I'm probably a pretty typical or a poster child type story for industrial designers. They generally do not take a straight path to industrial design. Most industrial designers that I've spoken with and talked about their story about how they become and became an industrial designer, it wasn't a straight path. Hey, I'm in high school, my art teacher, my math teacher, they told me about industrial design, and they suggested I go do that. It's typically not that they don't know what industrial design is. I took every art and every shop class I could ever take, and that started to paint a bit of, a bit of a picture. But, um, I didn't, I didn't have a lot of guidance coming out of high school as to where to go, what to do. I had taken an electrical wiring class in high school. We literally built walls, drilled holes, and ran wire like residential wiring, and we thought it was fun. I learned a lot about electricity, and that's kind of all I knew. And I looked around and all my friends are going to college, I thought, I guess I should go to college. I enjoy this thing. Let's go do that. So there was a local community college that had like, a two, two and a half year associate's degree in Electrical Tech. Technology. And so I started working as an electrician while I was going to school learning about, you know, hydraulics, pneumatics PLC, and then, you know, the wiring part of it, load calculations for like and it was fun, and it was It wasn't challenging in the creative way. But I was like, good. I was already making money in it. And so I took a trip to visit some of my friends at Auburn University. And one friend, Amy, who really knew me well, she said she was in graphic design. She says, You need to come over here to the industrial design department Smith Hall. And she says, there's some stuff you just need to see. I think you would, you would find it interesting. And I remember walking down the hall, and it was end of the back. Then Auburn was on quarters. It was the end of the quarter, and they were displaying all of their projects and and I remember thinking, Wait, there is a career where people get to do this. This is This is nuts. I can see what this is. And that particular project that they were displaying was a recycle reuse project, where you would take something old, end of life trash, and give it a new life. And so there was things like old tire treads that were made into flip flops or sandals. There was one of my favorites was a three liter bottle of like mountain dew that was flipped upside down, and a little clip was put on it, and you could put it over a golf ball and retrieve golf balls, and it would just hold to the golf balls. Mine was blown and I knew instantly, like, you just know, like, No, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. Okay, how do I get here? So I went back. I graduated. I took a couple of night classes just to transfer in. So finished my degree there, and then went to Auburn, and the rest is history. I got a degree in Industrial Design, and have been working as an industrial designer ever since. And generally, the industrial designers you talk to, most of them, are going to have some sort of crooked path to finding it, and that was mine.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, it's interesting. Industrial Design isn't one of those jobs that you hear about growing up, right? I mean common jobs you hear about engineer, doctor, lawyer, teacher, I don't know, counselor, right? But industrial design, that's not one that I was ever familiar with until it may have been after college, before I really heard the term industrial designer. I don't know why that is.
Chad Walters:Yeah, I would say in some of the bigger markets, like Chicago and out in LA and New York, where there a lot of the design jobs are, then perhaps you know your art teachers, your shop teachers in high school, would know about it and and know somebody who did that. But yeah, and in a rural Alabama, there wasn't a lot of people who do make sense.
Aaron Moncur:So that makes sense, that has something to do with it. Well, since it it might not be a familiar term for at least newer engineers. Can you talk a little bit about what is an industrial designer? It's interesting.
Chad Walters:You bring that, that particular question of because it's something as an industrial designer, you have to get good at doing, especially when you when you go and get your first big boy job and you're working with other people developing products, lo and behold, you're not going to be surrounded by just industrial designers. You're not going to be surrounded by just engineers. And so you have to get good at that that elevator pitch, what is the value you bring? Where do you fit in the process, that sort of thing. So to sort of keep it high level in the beginning of a program or beginning of a product development, there are three main things you need to think about. There's the business need. Why does this product even exist? There's the user need. You're developing a product. It's probably going to be used by a human, and that human has needs. It's solving a problem for them. But then you have to use some technology to create that thing, and that technology needs to be implemented in a meaningful way that meets both the user and the business need. So you have all of that to figure out in the beginning, and so you take in the inputs, and then you have to begin to create something, some solution, and then you evaluate that solution. Industrial designers are right in the very beginning. And the main things that we focus on early is some of the first questions that we're going to ask is, okay, who's the user? What are they using it for? Where are they using it? They have gloves on. Is it daylight? Is it outside? Like, just tell me the story. And so we start off early on with user research, just trying to understand the context of use and and just we're soaking it in. We're gathering it in. And it's a really, really messy time in the process, because you're living in this ambiguous time, which makes everybody nervous. You know, you just want to know that two plus two equals four most of the time, and you're comfortable. But in that moment, in this very ambiguous beginning of the process, you don't know. You don't know what the solution is. You don't know where you're going, but you're, you're collecting a lot of data. And so you have to get good with parsing out that data, synthesizing that data into meaningful direction, and we do a lot of that through user research, especially in med, device world. We work a lot with human factors engineers. They're specialists in doing research and helping you find those insights. But user research is key, and then once we start seeing patterns, oh, there seems to be a lot of interest in it being organized, or indicators being a special thing. Okay, cool. We know that indicators are special. We need to spend some more time understanding what good indicators are in this specific circumstance. And so you just slowly start sneaking up on it. And then once you have these, these constraints, which, early on in my career, constraints were just like a curse word. You're like, you just know, I don't want constraint. Just give me room to grow and blue sky and do it all you get. When you get mature, you've spent some more time in your career, you start to understand embracing constraints is actually really helpful for focus, but we're trying to create those constraints. Once we have a meaningful list of constraints that it's going back to the business need, we're starting poor technology that'll help us solve some of these problems, then we can start creating solutions that help solve the problems. And once we decide on the basic architecture of the products, like, say, the product needs battery, it needs a screen, it needs a handle, or these basic things, and we've configured it in a way that begins to be meaningful to start to solve that problem, then we can start developing concepts around that, that collection of parts configured in a certain way. That's when it starts getting fun, because now we have direction. We can start ramping up an engineering team like we can ramp up our design team, and we go off and do the fun part we've done all the hard part about finding direction, that's finding meaning and direction out of this ambiguity. And now we get to go do what we all want to do we come to work is just go design stuff and go solve problems and Engineer Engineer things. But we industrial designers, from the very beginning are just like, trying to create that direction. And then we all get excited and go off and design things. And we, we iterate with engineering. We we understand like, hey, we need this to happen. And engineers are like, a mechanical engineer is going to say, hey, you know, I can do that shape, but I'm going to have to have a lot of draft with that part because of the texture you want on it. And then we have that little debate, okay, cool. If you understand what I'm actually trying to achieve with the texture, then maybe we can talk about a different way to achieve the same thing, that we can still make it moldable. And that's that little back and forth. And so we'll go back and forth with engineering for months and months and months. And then finally, once the design is finalized and tested and the user's happy and business is happy, and our technology fits in it, and then we start to sort of fade out. And then engineering is going to ramp up and transition to manufacturing, and we'll pop back in when we start getting first parts off the tool, just to make sure that something didn't go sideways after we left. And then if everything's in the manufacturing process is actually still fulfilling that being the solution that our user needed. Then Then we're off to the races. So we're heavy in the beginning, lot of overlap with engineering, and then we taper off to let manufacturing so generally speaking, I would say the most common misconception about what industrial designers do is they make it look nice.
Aaron Moncur:Wait, wait, so you're telling me industrial design is more than just rounding corners and chamfering edges, just a little
Chad Walters:bit, just a little bit making it look nice is, yes, absolutely a part of our job, but it's a remarkably smaller part of the job than you might think.
Aaron Moncur:Is it fair to say that industrial design is, is like, it's like the architect of hardware development
Chad Walters:could be, yeah, and software as well, because a lot of times now the digital controls the physical, you know, and vice versa. So more so now, and especially in the last five to 10 years, with everything having a display on it, or even our control is getting more digital. Yeah, we spend a lot of time in the digital space as well.
Aaron Moncur:I think of an architect and like, they're not the engineer, right? Typically, an engineer signs off on an architect's drawings, but they're the ones who are kind of creating the space and understanding the needs of the users of that space, whether it's a home or a commercial building or whatever, and then they design it, and they don't have everything specified down to like the nail. And I don't know maybe they do, but my understanding is there, they largely do the design, and then an engineer might come in and sign off on some of the drawings afterwards.
Chad Walters:I think a good architect leans heavily on their Engineer. Sure they if they're seasoned and they've been been around, they kind of know what to expect, but they're not going to do that load calculation that says I need a beam here to hold up the ceiling. But they're going to go, it's a pretty big span, and probably need to anticipate there's going to be a beam here. I'm going to go ahead and put some beam in there, just so that we're thinking about it properly. But I'm going to go talk to my engineer and and they're gonna go, yeah, yeah, but your bean probably needs to be a little bit bigger and maybe shift it over. So yes, I would say, the the more seasons you get, the more appreciation you have, and you can kind of start anticipating and maybe speaking on their behalf sometimes. But in the end, it all needs to be verified. You know, by engineering for sure. It it, if there's a there's a time in which you want to involve engineering, especially if you're thinking about something that's that's going to have to have some calculation done, some testing done, just to make sure that there's, you know, it's heavily laden with reality, like it's going to be successful. There's, there's a point at which you need to bring that in and think, a good industrial designer, a good architect, will recognize when that moment is.
Aaron Moncur:If your company helps engineers design, build or manufacture better products, we should talk at PDX, the product development Expo. Companies don't just exhibit. They teach practical training right at their booth. Engineers walk away with new skills and companies build real relationships with the people who use their tools and services. The result is high quality connections built through real technical value. Pdx 2026 is October, 20 and 21st in Phoenix and booth selection is first come first served. Many are already reserved to learn more about exhibiting. Email us at PDX, at Team pipeline.us, I love making products both functional and beautiful, but I also know engineers who don't care that much about the esthetic, they just want it to work, which is fine, there's a place for that. To what degree have you encountered pushback or resistance from engineering teams who who look at what you're doing and say, Ah, that's just it's just fluff. We don't need that. We just need to make it functional.
Chad Walters:Yeah, all the time. Very frustrating. It is. But going back to that point where every industrial designer really learns, needs to learn how to talk about the value that they bring, understand their sales pitch you, I thought there was a point in which that was going to go away in my career, but it doesn't. You just have to get good at it, and you have to be you have to show grace to people who don't understand what you do. And you have to get good at not just being like upset with people who challenge you all the time, but look for good ways to help them understand why there's value in this thing that I'm proposing, this form, the shape, this texture, this finish in in product development, what we as industrial designers lean on for the esthetic side of things is visual brand language. And basically what that is is there's a company, they have a brand, and they've got a marketing and branding team that have defined that brand, and they've described as a brand, then they've described the way they want their customers to think about their brand when they interact with their products, or go to their website, that sort of thing. So if you think about cars, are really easy to sort of have this conversation. If I just say Ferrari, you know, a lot of things come to mind. You know, sport, fast, red, you know, mechanical, just amazing mechanical thing, right? Racing. But then you say Volkswagen, right? You get they're both cars. They both have a steering wheel and four wheels and an engine. But distinctly different things come to mind. It's a different target market. They talk about it differently, and that's essentially the crux of it. So we as industrial designers, if our clients don't have a very well defined visual brand language, which uses words to describe forms, to provide direction for when we do, make it look like a certain thing, then we help them through that. And it's it's a tough exercise, you know, I'm not the best at that. I've got, I work with people who, you know, they've got a knack for really extracting what you want your customer to feel when they when they hold on to that Yeti water bottle. You know that I love the shape of that and and this color and the fact that that stainless finish is there, like they're good at, like, extracting that out and then translating that into words and example forms that we can use that when we get to the point to say, Okay, now we know the battery needs to be here, the handle needs to be here, and it needs a seven inch touchscreen, and the light needs to be viewed from this angle and this far away. We've got all that down. Okay, that stuff just be in this box. Now let's style it in a way that reinforces the brand, language, that reinforces the brand, that. We want in a physical shape. It's hard, it's nebulous, it's hard to talk about, sometimes it's hard to describe in words, especially to engineers, sometimes that really don't want to spend a lot of brain power to try and understand. But there is. It's not my opinion. If it's purple and swoopy, it's not because Chad likes purple and swoopy. It's because that purple and swoop reinforces that brand, and it's meaningful to that brand. It's a business decision, not just because of, like, purple. I've done things before that. I'm like, oh, man, this is not, this is not what I want to do, for sure.
Aaron Moncur:I don't like this color name on this,
Chad Walters:yeah, but no, it was the right thing for the customer, and they loved it because it did the right thing for their brand, and that was the right choice, you know. But nice spending some time to talk through people and talk through it with people, I think is challenging. You have to get good at it and but if anybody ever dismisses the way something looks, it's probably because they just haven't stopped and said, you know, why do I like that? You know, what? What is, what does that color make me feel in that moment? It's red, it's, it's getting my attention, or it's, it's a soothing, you know, color because of what I'm doing. Like, yeah, it fits. Or that interaction with that knob, it just clicks and gives me the feedback I need to and it just, it's a little cold to the touch, and the knurling is really nice. Like, just stop and think about it. You're like, okay, that's, that's why that's nice. That's why I feel that that is nice. It's the details.
Aaron Moncur:What are some of the tools that you use as an industrial designer, for example, an engineer, SolidWorks. Solid works all day, if they're designing something or Excel, or maybe a force sensor or an oscilloscope, these are some of the tools that engineers commonly use. What are the analogs for industrial design?
Chad Walters:There's a lot of overlap, I would say, with mechanical and some software as it relates to graphical user interface development. But I would say our suite of tools is generally Adobe, Illustrator, maybe not so much Photoshop, unless you get into some presentation type tools, you really need to Doctor the final image. But I would say Illustrator is a big one for us, because we're creating illustrator illustrations to communicate an idea often time, and it's a very clean way to do it, to produce a nice there's Sketchbook Pro, which allows you to digitally sketch on a display on an iPad, those sorts of things. And those are getting really good, like right now, you can just draw a circle, and you can say, I want that to be a circle, and it goes and it's a circle. It's a perfect circle. So and in the beginning of thinking about tools evolving to the fact where you don't have to draw a perfect circle. Now you think, oh, no, I'm losing a skill. But honestly, it's just allowing you to create that story, communicate that idea so much faster, in a clean way. It's actually really good. You still have to start with the circle, but Sketchbook Pro is another one, but the Adobe Suite. But yeah, we'll use we'll use SolidWorks a lot. We will jump into SolidWorks or a CAD program, probably sooner than you would think, because oftentimes you have to figure out proportions, because we'll sketch something, and that's sort of the first line of defense of like, getting some idea out of my head onto paper so I can show it to you and say I'm thinking this generally going to be a pen and a pad of paper, but we're probably not going to get proportions down quite right, and we can't rotate that to see if it was what you'll draw a couple different views, maybe some profiles, but we'll jump into CAD pretty quickly to sort of flush out that idea. And we should really print, and I'm in the shop all the time making a huge mess. It's it's big fun.
Aaron Moncur:Do you have a CAD program of choice when it comes to the the core industrial design activities?
Chad Walters:Um, I cut my teeth on back in the day pro E, and then transitioned, I don't know, about 1015, years ago, to SolidWorks. And was like, Man, why did I wait so long? That's because, because, when I learned, learned pro EA, the PTC product, when it's changed so many names over the years, but I'm a lot of keystrokes, you know, feature create a lot of drop down menus. And then when SolidWorks came along, it was, it was much better. And like the icons made change, it was intuitive. I asked an engineer, hey, can you spend, spend a lunch, lunch time, lunch time with me, and just teach me a few things, and 30 minutes in I'm sick. Thanks, man, I got it. It's pretty old, yeah, now we spent a lot of time surfacing in that tool, whereas I generally our engineers are not forced to surface a lot, and that's a portion of the tool that we use a lot, because we'll create more organic shapes sometimes, or we want a specific surface transition that we can't really do with solids, and so we spent a lot of time in surfacing. But I would say what's really good about getting good in SolidWorks as an industrial designer is it's the tool your engineers are going to be familiar with. It's the language. They speak and you can just share files and make it zero.
Aaron Moncur:Pipeline now offers procurement of custom machined parts at significantly lower costs without sacrificing speed or quality. We design and build custom machines ourselves, so we consume a lot of precision machined components. Over the past several years, we developed a proven overseas supply chain to support that work, and in 2025 we successfully piloted that capability with select customers. Now we're opening it up more broadly. If you'd like to see how our prices and lead times compare. Send us a drawing or two for quote, visit team pipeline.us. Or message me directly on LinkedIn. Yeah, I remember having a similar experience with pro e back in the day. It was what, 9798 when I the first time I opened the CAD program, and it was pro engineer, and there were all those drop down menus, like you had to go, like, you know, half a dozen menus deep before you got to the thing that you actually wanted to use. And then years later, trying solid works. And it just seemed so simple. There were these cool animations that would rotate to orthogonal views in an atom and animated fashion. It's like, Oh, wow. This is pretty neat. Yeah. So for all the engineers out there listening to this, who maybe they have, maybe they haven't worked with an ID, an industrial designer, like, what are some challenges that you've encountered working with engineers and like, what can engineers do to facilitate a more successful, I guess, relationship with their industrial designer?
Chad Walters:Yeah, I think I would start with, if you step back and look at the process, from soup to nuts, beginning to end, the idea to the finished design part disciplines. Disciplines are going to sort of come and go. They're going to be a part of certain parts of the process. And just understanding where everybody fits, talked a little bit earlier about like, how we're early on, and then we have a lot of overlap with engineering. And then, you know, we'll transition out as they finish, and then they'll transition to manufacturing, and they'll ramp down. I think I would start there, making sure you're talking about the same process. Early on in my career, it was kind of like constraints. I'm like process. Who needs process? Like, I just need to be free and and then I, then I, finally realized the value of process when I saw a good process and it was mapped out in a way that was easy to see. And I don't think that that is necessarily taught to us in school on either side of that process.
Aaron Moncur:I'm curious.
Chad Walters:So it's kind of like what we talked about earlier, like you don't have requirements right out of the gate. You have to go figure out what the requirements should be that creates a product that meets the need, you know, both the business and the user, and then you go off and make sure you choose the right technology to do that. So it's, it's sort of exploring a lot of ideas in a very structured way, going to the right users, getting feedback from the right sources that inform the design in their right way, and then being okay with letting ideas go and narrowing down. So you start out wide, and you narrow down, and then you go off. Then you're just you accelerate and go design. But it's iteration. I think the most valuable thing in product development is iteration, your ability to test something, learn from it and move on, take that little nugget of learning and move on. So it's lots of inputs, iteration, narrowing down iteration definition, then go off and design something that's that's key. I would say just the statement of iteration being the most valuable thing in product development is because that's where you learn. I think we talk about design principles, or a principle for developing a product. One of my favorite ones is not only embracing constraints, but embracing failure as a mechanism to learn, and we're taught that failure is a bad word, and in society, it gets a bad rap, in my opinion, the moment that you can be excited to fail, and you learn how to fail really, really fast and high quality failure, and you get excited, because, you know, if the sooner I can get to the failure, the sooner I'm going to learn to pass forward. Man, that's that's like empowering. And so I really want people to not be worried about failure. I want them to figure out how to prototype, test, learn and move on. Like. That is so valuable.
Aaron Moncur:What? What does a good failure look like versus a bad failure in product design?
Chad Walters:I think a bad failure would be prototyping more than you need to to learn what you're the question, you know, you have a question. I need to learn, is it yes or no or what is it? And then you develop some crazy, expensive prototype that took you way too long to make, just to learn a question, learn an answer that you you could have taken duct tape and a sheetrock screwed in two by four and learned what you needed to learn. So that's what I mean about getting good at failing has a lot to do with getting good at prototyping, and only to the point that you need, maybe we don't need to spend 10 hours in CAD and print something where I can go in and I can literally cut something out of a two by four and stick a screw in and go, Oh, that's right. It's going to bind up when I do that, or it's going to interfere with this thing, or when I sit it over here and try and do this other thing with it that I hadn't really thought about, it doesn't work. I've got, I've got, what, 30 minutes of my time. I've got $3 in parts, and I've got that same nugget, right? There's no sense in me spending a day in cat, right? Yeah, yep, a good, a good one, though, on Contra, on the contrary, a good prototype would be getting to that, learning, like, super, super fast, and being okay with throwing that prototype in the trash and moving on, because you, you got that nugget and you ran off with it, right?
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, maximize number of shots on goal. Yeah. There you go. You talk about storytelling sometimes, and let's talk a little bit about that. What does storytelling look like in the context of product design, and why is it? Why is it important? I don't know many engineers who are great storytellers.
Chad Walters:So I use storytelling as a way of conveying an idea, telling the steps that I went through to come to a conclusion. And therefore my recommendation for, you know, implementing a particular design or a feature in a design. If you've ever heard anybody talk about the basic architecture of a movie or a sitcom, there's this story arc. Like you present the problem, you have this whole challenge, and then you know, you solve the problem, and the guy runs off of the girl, right? There's this arc and and the moment you you hear about this, this architecture, it ruins every movie, right? You have to sort of just not think about that and just try and enjoy the movie from that point on. But you can pick it out in every movie. And it's just this basic human communication tool where, if I go in and I'm going to present work that I've been doing to you the client, but you haven't been there with me along the way. If I just roll in and say, here's what I think we should do. We should do this. Trust me like that's not a story that's you trusting me. Now, maybe we've worked together forever and you just trust anything I say, and that's fine, but that's generally not the case. You need to lead them to the solution. So you need to tell them the story of what you did, I had this problem to solve. We didn't know if this was going to work or not, so I created these three concepts and made a prototype. And here's some testing. This is where we broke something. And I've got a picture of the broken thing, whatever it is, and that, oh, why did it break this? And that's how that informed this next prototype. And this is how we fix the problem. And here's some images of it, maybe some illustrations of how it functions, but you're bringing them along. Like, here's the problem, here's the story, here's how we came up with the solution. And this is why I'm going to recommend that we do this. If you, if you do a good job at telling the story about anything to a client, like, if you just spend some time, create a presentation that tells a story that makes sure that they understand how you got from point A to point B. Man, that is a way better conversation. You're building trust with your client. They're going to they're going to begin to come into a meeting and say, what do you what should we do? Chad, and okay, cool, I trust you, right? They're going to trust that you've gone through the right process. But so often we we've done all the work. We're exhausted. We just want to move on. Like just, can we just go do this thing like this? We know this is the thing we need to do. But if you just spend some time tell a quick story, and if, once you learn the value of telling a story to to bring people along, you'll start thinking about it as you're doing work. You're machining something. You break that in Mill. Oh, better take a picture of that. And the thing that it why it broke? Maybe it's the code, the G code. Maybe it's the fact that my feed rate was there, I didn't fix your properly, or something, right? There's a story in everything when you when you break something like there's a solution for that. Snap a quick picture of it. Take a quick note, like thinking about the presentation you're going to make, and it makes that presentation building so much easier. You just, you type a few words, you bring in a picture and say, put an arrow towards it, and you tell a little story about why you broke that in Mill. It's not done.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, it's crazy that telling a story, it's almost like this, I don't know, proof. In a way, you tell someone a story about why something makes sense, or how something happened before, and oftentimes they'll just accept it, as opposed to you just say, this is how it should be done. Then they're going to be like, Well, why? Why should it be done that way? But a story is almost like this, this like irrefutable proof, almost, yeah, that's, that's
Chad Walters:why you should do it that way. Even in the process of building the a little three slide story, I will realize, you know what, I didn't think about this, you can almost anticipate the questions that are going to come, and you can prep for that you're like, you know, in the process of even putting this together, I realized I should have done this. So rather than me suggesting we do this, I want to go off and spend, you know, half a day and do this other thing that, and just being open about the process like you build this trust and in in the space that I work in, where I've got multiple clients, I have not worked with a lot of them. I've worked with a lot of them, but just getting them to trust me to spend $11 million to develop their product, right? It's big deal. It's really important, from a business perspective, that you not only story tell, but so that they trust you as a consultant to and your recommendation. They build trust. It's good.
Aaron Moncur:Speaking of stories, can you think of a story or experience where you were trying to uncover a user need or a technical requirement. You're in that early stage, messy phase of product design, and I don't know you did something, you came up with some way of uncovering a user need or technical requirement. And does anything like that come to mind a success story where you were able to uncover a user need.
Chad Walters:Oh, man, let's see. Oh, you know, it's interesting. There was a god, this is probably 15 years ago. I'm surprised it popped up anyway. That's exciting, that I can pull memories like that from 15 years ago. Yeah. So there was a device that would look at your eye like a, like a camera that would just go right on top of your eye, and then it would produce a display that the ophthalmologist could look at and do some things, and they could see a high resolution version of your eye. And they said, we really need this device to be able to do this thing, and it needs a battery that lasts eight hours. Because, you know, generally, people work eight hours a day, okay, eight hours. And then we started thinking about the display. We started thinking about the optics inside of it, and all it needed to do. We kind of came up with a power budget and said, huh, eight hours a day, that's going to be a big battery. And there was another requirement. They were like, hey, you know, I'm going to use it and I'm going to put it down. I'm going to use it again. So we talked about the usability, like the context of use, where they were going to be using and where they were going to be sending things down. And the device needed a bit of a cradle so it didn't just flop over. And once we realized the battery was so big, tell me a little bit about this cradle that you want to hold it, and how long do you think it's going to sit in this cradle? And really, when it came down to it, it was spend more time in the cradle than in their hand. They just needed to pick it up, maybe spend two or three minutes and set it down. It's like, if that cradle becomes a charging base, your battery can be a fraction of the size, and it actually fit in the handle, and you might not even know it has a battery in it. And they're like, Oh, that's great idea. So we just did the math. We walked it out and and just from just a few questions and a few prototypes, we came up with, you know, something that no one knew even had a battery in it. You could pull it right out of the handle. But just being inquisitive, challenging people, getting them to because they came to us, hey, it needs a battery life, eight hours, just based on the wrong information. So that was a perfect story.
Aaron Moncur:Great story. Yeah, perfect illustration. We we often have the same situation where a customer will come to us and tell us what they think the requirements are, and after a little digging, we realize actually that might not be a hard requirement. Transitioning here to another question that I want to ask you about in our world, which is primarily machine design, whenever we're quoting a project, it always comes down to ROI. And usually, not always, but usually the customer has some sense of what the ROI is, right? If I have this new machine, this piece of automation, I can make my widget eight times faster, and that's going to result in X amount of new revenue and Y amount of labor savings that we can put towards other processes. So they usually have some understanding of what their ROI is. How do you evaluate, or how do you help your customers evaluate the ROI of user centric design of the, you know, the ID element?
Chad Walters:Yeah, I think the most valuable way to describe the value that that we would bring. Is helping them make the decision early on about the right product. Because if we if we do our work ahead of time, and we define what the right product is, again, that meets the business and the user needs and uses technology in a meaningful way, then we reduce the risk going forward that we're going to have to come back and revisit the story. Is this the right product? We'll have clients that come to us and say, Hey, this is what we want. Here's all the requirements. What's it going to cost? How long is it going to take? Okay, well, well, that thing is going to take, you know, $7 million in 18 months. And we'll get you to this, this, this design, and then we ask a few questions, just for context, why would you do this? Why would you do this? Help Us Just understand that so we can make the right component choice or whatever, you start to slowly unpack the fact that they didn't really have good, good reasons for choosing that feature or whatever. So we want to back up and do the right thing, because in the moment that we've decided, oh, you know, maybe this isn't the right product, we've saved them millions and months for sure. So the value we bring is starting early on asking the right questions and increasing confidence that we're doing the right product and therefore reducing risk. Because I like to think that like one assumption, one unit of assumption equals one unit of risk, and we don't want to do, you know, risky things with our clients money or their time. So if we can get good data behind every decision that ultimately reduces risk and increases our confidence that we're confidence that we're doing the right thing. And and I try, I try, and when I have this conversation with people, sometimes I'm like, Okay, let's, let's think about the smallest component in this device, this resistor on this on this circuit board. If we don't have a why we chose that resistor on this circuit board that you can map back to a usability need or a business need, then we're making an assumption. Can everybody agree with that? Absolutely yes. Well, why would that resistor? Well, that resistor was chosen specifically for how it drives this display. We chose this display because how how much data, how much content is going to be on the display, how far away from the user, the user is going to be looking at the display, the viewing angle, the knit level, the brightness. We've chosen this display to meet a very specific usability need. We've chosen this display from this manufacturer because it meets your business need from your manufacturing cost. And therefore we'd need this PCB, this component, this resistor to drive that display. There's the why behind that stupid little resistor should have a why behind it, and that's where you get all this confidence, is that you've everything is driven from some data. You've done some research that says, yep, that's bright enough in the condition. I can see it at 60 degree off angle. I can see the fact that the digit is big enough because I'm standing 15 feet away and users happy.
Aaron Moncur:You've been doing this a long time now, 20 years. What still excites you about product design?
Chad Walters:I think when you you've been doing something this long, you you have your own little story arc about your career. And then I think today is in get that gets me most excited or makes me feel most fulfilled. Is not necessarily the sketching, the CAD, the creating, the doing the like creating of the thing, but it's mentoring and leading the people who are doing it today, realizing that I have experience. I've cut myself, I've had that wound, I have that scar now, and just the sheer fact that I can almost, in some circumstances, tell you exactly what's going to happen next if you do this thing. And so to be able to come into somebody who can out, sketch me any day out, you know, CAD me any day, has beautiful sense of style, just bringing along my experience to help them. Man, you can talk about acceleration, that's, that's, that's pretty beautiful thing. So I get more excited about coming along somebody and just sitting on a bunch of projects and providing some experience and then watching them go and just crush it. I would do that all day long.
Aaron Moncur:That's terrific. What advice would you give to whether they're young designers, or maybe engineers who are listening to this, thinking, geez, this sounds pretty cool. I might like to do this,
Chad Walters:choosing the path of industrial design, right?
Aaron Moncur:Yes,
Chad Walters:yeah, I would say maybe think about so there's this continuum, if we created a continuum in. Industrial Design continuum between artist and engineer. Everybody who wants to be an industrial designer is probably going to be somewhere on there. I'm probably somewhere in the middle, leans a little towards engineering. I've never been the guy with a great sense of style and could design beautiful things, but we have those, and I think there's a really great complementary aspect of having industrial designers that have strengths in certain areas, but maybe think about it that way, because there's a lot of room for you to play on that continuum. You can go design furniture, you can go design automobiles, you can design all sorts of stuff. I've know people who've been in the lighting industry. I know people have been in like, developing toys. You know, those are super fun. I started out in the aviation industry, went to the automotive, automotive aftermarket, and now we're, you know, doing med device. So there's, you can get really, really technical in the discipline as well. But I think just understanding that there's a there's a lot of place to play. And if you are curious about how things go together and how humans interact with those things, and how you can make them even better for human interaction, then there's probably a place for you as an industrial designer, I would say professionally, though, since there's not a lot of us and not a lot of there's not industrial designers In every town, like, there is a dentist you're probably going to have to go to, you know, the job you're going to be have to be okay with that, unless you want to, you know, have your own consultancy, which is a whole other ball of wax that's that brings its own challenges. But, yeah, there's a, there's a, there's a lot of place to play within the continuum between artist and engineer.
Aaron Moncur:Great. All right, Chad, I've got just one more question for you, and then we'll wrap this up here. So you've been super generous sharing your time and and background, experience expertise with us. Thank you. One of my goals with the podcast is to facilitate connections between the industry, and is there something that you're working on right now that perhaps a listener, someone in our audience right now, could help you with a person that you're trying to meet technology, you're trying to understand a vendor, you're trying to Find anything like that?
Chad Walters:Well, I do find myself hanging out with a lot of entrepreneurs lately. There's a I'm in, I'm in the Raleigh area. There's a great ecosystem for startups and entrepreneurialism, and so, you know, I go out to a lot of just social events and meet people who and it's just fun to sort of hang out in the back of the room and hear people talk about their problems and just, you know, grab a drink and have a conversation with people. I love to do that. I'm getting more interested in the venture capital space, because there's an interesting intersection where entrepreneurs who have a really great idea but zero experience in how to develop a product, are looking for funding, and then you've got, you've got venture capital, private equity for looking for these, these founders and and, but need some help understanding what, what is the opportunity they have. And so I'm really curious about meeting more people in the venture capital space, probably med device, but it, doesn't really matter to me that, and I love making connections in this entrepreneurial space. So if anybody has anybody, they think I'd like, I'd love to talk to you. I'd love to meet them and spend some time chatting with them, and they can, you can find me on LinkedIn. Probably, probably the easiest, terrific.
Aaron Moncur:So is that entrepreneurs aren't entrepreneurs generally an introduction to or specifically, venture capital, private equity groups, or all of the above, I would say all
Chad Walters:of the above. I still have a lot to learn about venture capital, so I think that'd be a that'd probably be more of interest right now I get to scratch that itch. I've been mentoring students at UNC and NC State here for 1516, years now. And it's really fun to help people understand the new process and and so doing that with with older people who have more experience still the same, same itch get scratched, to be able to just help people make the right decision. And I feel like I'm, I'm, I'm getting that locally in Raleigh, which is super cool socially, but I still haven't talked enough VC yet. I think I'd love to talk to more people like that.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, great. So all of you, dear listeners out there, if you have connections with VCs, please reach out to Chad and make an introduction, and let's use this platform to make those connections and help each other. I'd appreciate that. Okay, Chad, anything else that we haven't talked about that you think we should hit on before winding up this episode?
Chad Walters:Oh, man, I appreciate you doing this. Though I'm creating a platform that we can have these conversations and enjoy talking about what we do. I'd love to spend some more time chatting with you about your business in one day and talking about what you do too. But no, I think. We've covered a lot in a short amount of time.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, terrific, Chad, thank you so much for being with us today. You're welcome. I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please share the episode to learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R and D services. Visit us at Team pipeline.us. To join a vibrant community of engineers online. Visit the wave. Dot engineer, thank you for listening. You I, being an engineer, has more than 300 episodes, and you don't have to listen to them in order. If you're dealing with a specific challenge right now, there's a good chance we've already interviewed an engineer who's been through it. You can jump around, search by topic and listen to what's most relevant to you. See you on the next episode, you.
