Founder and CEO of Design 1st Kevin Bailey is “responsible for setting the strategic direction of the company.”
Kevin Bailey has led Design 1st for more than 25 years in offering a “full suite of end-to-end product development expertise—research, design, engineering, prototypes, testing, marketing support, transfer to production and finalizing product for first market release.”
With Design 1st, Kevin Bailey nurtures a “positive environment with specialist development teams of design, engineering and NPI manufacturing all working to one goal, the client’s business success.”
With Kevin Bailey at the helm, Design 1st has “delivered over 1,000 products to market across a variety of industries, and that influence millions of people globally.”
Design 1st and Kevin Bailey have helped a lot of global companies in turning their ideas into “successful commercialized products,” including Motorola, Acer, Stanley Tools, Ericsson and Christie Digital.
Before Design 1st, Kevin Bailey worked for companies at the cutting edge of “global hardware product innovation.”
Kevin Bailey cut his teeth while working with the National Research Council, General Motors, Shell, Bell Northern Research Labs and Nortel Networks
While working at these companies, Kevin Bailey “played an integral role in their forward-thinking behavioral research focused design team on next generation communication devices.”
For example, Kevin Bailey worked on the “first global smartphone design, development and initial production in 1994.”
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We help clients focus the development on the first customer. Kevin Bailey, Design 1st
Jerome Knyszewski: What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
Kevin Bailey: I’d say our team and cross product experience provides clients instant expertise from senior, hands on talent working together across all stages of the product development.
This includes business and marketing support services too.
We know hardware product development projects are risky.
But we also know that with the right partner, you can transform a touchable idea into a successful commercialized product if you get the right features together in a useable configuration to match a consumer’s needs.
The top two things that make Design 1st stand out from competitors include:
- We help clients focus the development on the first customer, identify risks and perfect new features and opportunities so the product delivered to market fits the business targets and strategy perfectly.
We identify the supply, marketing and products risks early, focus on the high value new product features and test frequently to overcome the technical challenges while never losing sight of the overall product lifecycle goals. - We can plug in and be useful immediately with a team of cross-functional, senior hands-on experts in critical design areas that act as an extension of your team and guide you through the entire product development stage with our ability to identify high risks, find opportunities, and qualify with data to ensure critical product success-failure decisions are made timely and carefully reducing time to market and development cost.
Jerome Knyszewski: Often leaders are asked to share the best advice they received. But let’s reverse the question. Can you share a story about advice you’ve received that you now wish you never followed?
Kevin Bailey: I had two rounds of co-owner partners in the early days.
Growing from 1 to 10 is difficult and collaborating with other likeminded business and design-oriented entrepreneurs had its risks.
I was told this would be a better way to grow and bring in new business, very similar to law and accounting firms where each person books clients and admin and resources are shared.
In the end, both partners in the early days moved on as it wasn’t the right fit, but it was a great learning exercise for me as I realized the next set of partners would be found within my existing staff within the company, and this arrangement has been far richer and rewarding for all.
Development is an iterative process so don’t expect to know where to point the arrow and all the important elements of the design at the start.
Jerome Knyszewski: You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Kevin Bailey:
Determination
Each partner relationship breakdown was difficult.
Learning how to sell, hiring staff and not taking salary, making sure the staff never felt there was risk in working at Design 1st helped me develop the “pick yourself up and get on with it attitude”.
Don’t get me wrong, I recall two times in the early years where I was close to say “enough” and I am glad I told myself “give it another week” which turned into “give it another month”.
My wife Lynn was instrumental in supporting wherever she could as we built the company over the years.
I thank her often for the determination she had supporting the company that now has people for all the key jobs and thrives with far less daily touch today.
Risk Taker
Jumping from a 6-figure job to a zero salary with 3 kids and a stay at home wife I think says it all. I think my wife, Lynn, was more of the risk taker.
I was able to follow my passion and with my skills in new product development I learned how to break down incomplete and conflicting information and situations into bits, look at them more closely, and reconfigure them into something new that works.
These skills are directly transferrable to building a business.
Over time I have fine-tuned my ability to wear both business and technical product hats to resolve product and people issues with a win-win mindset.
Committed to Building Diverse Teams
I grew up in a nurturing environment and have a great passion to share my experience and help grow the skillset of the people around me.
I thrive in watching bright, driven, intelligent people become even more capable and energized, creating amazing products and contributing to building a more effective and efficient organization.
Build out a diverse team that encompasses technical, business, and interpersonal skillset with vast experiences.
Even today, all staff still get a huge emotional burst and sense of inclusivity as we experience new products that come to life weekly in our creative environment.
People that visit our studios cannot believe the things that we do, and many say I want to work here — it’s amazing.
Jerome Knyszewski: Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?
Get outside of the office, get as far away from business development and designing and instead thinking about new product ideas as much as you can! There will always be new product needs and endless customers.
Developing new products is incredibly immersive, almost a form of addiction, yet so rewarding at the time that it can consume every minute of your day, like video games to some people.
Jerome Knyszewski: What are the most common mistakes you have seen CEOs & founders make when they start a business? What can be done to avoid those errors?
Kevin Bailey: CEO’s and founders of hardgoods equipment ‘product’ companies must remember that a failed product delivery to market could translate into company failure.
Particularly with Entrepreneurs, the success of a new company is contingent on the success of a new product in market and more importantly, how impactful it is to your first customers.
From a hardware product development failure standpoint, here are the 2 most common mistakes I see founders make when they start a business:
- They don’t know who their first customer is. The first question CEO’s and founders should ask themselves is what specific audience they are trying to sell to, how big is this audience, how you will reach this audience and why they would need this new product over what they use or do today.
You could have an incredible idea for a product but if you don’t have clear data on the value of your ‘killer’ new user experience, you could end up bringing to market a great product but for the wrong audience or for the target audience but the wrong feature set.
Products more and more are software applications with recurring revenue streams and one component of the user experience is the hardware that enables the service use.
Know your first customer, test the product concepts with them, figure out what exactly will make the product irresistible and focus the design and development team on this.
Development is an iterative process so don’t expect to know where to point the arrow and all the important elements of the design at the start.
The right development team will take the initial loose and fuzzy targets and refine and test and deliver a solution configured to the customer in a predictable process. - They don’t assess risks early. Customers don’t use a product they don’t like or one that fails to perform.
Field failures and ‘it does not work for me’ returns of hardgoods are not only expensive resolve (recalls etc.) and many times they bankrupt small companies.
If you don’t have the expertise in house, find an outside partner with expertise in identifying the really obvious risks early and can navigate the challenges successfully throughout the entire product design lifecycle.
High risks have many forms, for example patents, cost, user satisfaction, physics, manufacturing and product reliability risks.
Concept design is the most important phase in any product development project where you make major decisions on features, structure, technology and configuration.
Making poor decisions at this stage has two likely outcomes, the development team discovers it later on and its costly to go back and redo design or the high-risk element gets missed and your customer finds it for you.
To get it right, find a senior team that has lived through these risk mistakes, knows how to identify them and follow a structured design-for-users and design-for-manufacturing process that identifies key acceptance, feature and feasibility risks and lays out the mechanical, electronics and software architectures.
Be sure to identify high risk elements early, test and review before producing hundreds and thousands of the final product solution.
Jerome Knyszewski: In your experience, which aspect of running a company tends to be most underestimated? Can you explain or give an example?
Kevin Bailey: The most invisible skill a person running a company has is to triage situations so spiraling negative or distracting events and activities don’t impact employee morale or productivity.
One example is staff interactions with clashing personalities. Diffusing personnel conflicts takes skill and art.
If left unaddressed, a situation can morph into a bigger problem and deflect employees in other areas of the business away from their focus and output.
Through osmosis or active training, CEO’s must be committed to leadership training across all lines of business so these leaders can recognize potential explosive situations and address them quickly.
Careful guidance in how to address potentially explosive situations will lead to fewer of these type “crisis” instances actually happening.
Having this talent is definitely underestimated in my view.
Customers don’t use a product they don’t like or one that fails to perform. Kevin Bailey
Jerome Knyszewski: You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Kevin Bailey: I reflect on the real deep reward I feel when I participate in creating a product.
My reflection on something amazing that I witnessed was the idea of Creativity clubs making ‘things that work’ learning in schools at lunch for grade 1 to grade 3 students.
I was asked to go into my children’s public schools when they were young at lunch breaks while I was at Nortel and create a Curiosity Corner which I did for several years.
I had a new experiment to build for each participating child, typically 5 to 15 children. They had fun and we made sure it always felt like magic.
They got to build many simple things that worked, they learned about air, magnets, balls, gravity and electricity with very simple low-cost things that are easy to put together.
As I watched my 2 boys and daughter at this age go through the school system, I noticed by 3rd grade, this age group shifted to more cautious interest and suppressing the earlier unbundled curiosity.
My takeaway was this was the age when all the children wanted into the club and I watched in amazement where most children were enthusiastic participants and absorbed a deeper understanding of objects, movement and 3D.
I see this being tried today in various ways but primarily with older kids.
I’d love to see steady momentum in embedding science, math and basic business thinking in its simplest forms using fun, interactive ways tailored for this specific age group.
Jerome Knyszewski: This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!
