Beyond the Brief: Designing Products Consumers Want

Kristin Allen, CEO and Co-Founder of ENTR Technologies, a software platform for regulatory-driven R&D and nutrition analysis for food and beverage manufacturers, recently sat down with Stephanie Diamond, Innovation Manager at GoMacro, to chat about consumer-led product development and learn more about her fascinating career spanning food science, design thinking, and innovation. 

Kristin: Stephanie, your career has had this really deliberate arc from food science at Eat Just into design thinking at IDEO. Then, you went back into innovation leadership at SharkNinja and now GoMacro. Was that transition to IDEO a conscious pivot, or did it happen organically?

Stephanie: Yes, it was a conscious pivot. I've always been really interested in the bigger picture when it comes to the food industry, and I dabbled in a few different disciplines early in my career. I worked in quality, R&D, and product development - I even did regulatory for a short period of time… but ultimately, I always felt a bit creatively stifled. Even in product development, which is generally regarded as the most creative food science discipline to be in, I would just be handed a brief that would say here's the product that we want you to go execute on. It was really prescriptive - this is the flavor profile, the size, packaging, the nutritional requirements - and I was always craving to be upstream of that, to be the one creating the brief. 

When the opportunity at IDEO came up, it felt really perfect, because it was focused on front-end innovation, it brought the consumer into the process, and it allowed me to actually have a hand in the design of food products, restaurant menus, and beyond. 

Kristin: IDEO is famous for human-centered design, but it's not a food company. So, I'm curious - what did working there teach you about consumers that you couldn't have learned by staying inside the food industry?

Stephanie: I think having such a close conduit to consumers at IDEO taught me a few different lessons. First, as someone who had spent most of their time either on the bench or in a manufacturing plant, I had very little access to consumers. I’d never really heard their voices before, to be totally honest, and I learned that there's a lot of emotion behind what consumers say. It gets lost when it's just distilled down into a top-line summary.

At IDEO, empathy is at the heart of everything they do, and it really taught me to question my own assumptions and dogma around food and ingredients.

I came from a really traditional background in food science. I have my bachelor's and master's from land-grant universities, and I approached food and development with this lens of, “is this research-backed? What does the literature say? Is it in support of this or not? What's the most correct thing that I know with the data that I have?”

But that's not how you design for consumers. You need to have an open mind and really believe their lived experience. I think oftentimes what consumers are saying and what the research community knows to be true are at odds with each other.

For example, if consumers are saying they don't want something to have an artificial sweetener, what are they really saying? What's the why behind that?

Questioning my own assumptions and being more open-minded beyond what I was taught as a scientist has been extremely valuable to me - not just in practicing human-centered design, but as a collaborator in general.

Kristin: At IDEO, you were doing research to understand the meaning behind consumer behaviors and choices. Not just what people do, but why. How can traditional R&D roles apply this kind of research to their work, where there's so much pressure to move fast?

Stephanie: First, I think the most important thing is to really advocate for being part of consumer research. I already mentioned this, but nothing replaces hearing feedback from the consumer firsthand.

The second is to be really curious. There's a lot you can learn by just acting on curiosity about the world around you, and asking questions of the people you're interacting with and encountering in real life.

I've even gone to the grocery store and just stood in the section of the category I was working on and asked people when they came to the shelf, “Why did you pick that one?”

Another example - I used to sit in the cafeteria in college and hang out there. I was so interested in what people were eating and how they were making their lunch plates. I remember especially at the salad bar, the way people would assemble their meals was so interesting. There was one girl who would put cottage cheese and balsamic vinegar instead of dressing on her salad, and now I know that to be kind of an early signal of the protein movement.

Imagine if I had worked at a salad dressing company or were an entrepreneur, I could have turned that observation into a cottage cheese dressing. Actually, that should probably exist now.

Being out in the world and being curious is where you get inspired, and you see people's hacks and workarounds, and that's what really drives excitement and new ideas.

And there's nothing preventing you from doing that.

Kristin: You've talked about this idea of “believing the consumer”. What does that actually mean in practice, and what does it look like when a team doesn't do it, even if they think they are?

Stephanie: Whether we know it or not, we all live in our own little bubbles, and we think that everyone thinks and behaves the way we do. When you hear points of view or practices that don't align with yours, it's really hard to make sense of it, when people's diets or their lifestyle is just very different from yours.

So we have to force ourselves to believe the research and stay anchored in the consumer’s desires. That product might not be for you, but you have to be open and willing to design a product that might not appeal to you.

Kristin: What's the real difference between designing a product for a consumer versus just developing a product that a consumer might buy?

Stephanie: So, developing a product is all about execution - making sure the formula, process, packaging, nutrition targets, shelf life, all of that, essentially works and functions the way it should. Designing a product flips that by starting with people.

What's their behavior? What context are they in? How do they emotionally feel at different times of the day? What are they trying to solve? What kind of person do they want to be that they're working towards? What are the trade-offs that they're making on a day-to-day basis?

And then working backwards.

As an example, if you have a hydration drink - someone might be drinking it in the morning after a workout, or they might have it at their desk when they're at work. It’s important to understand the emotional mindsets that are applicable to both situations. In the morning, for example, if they just finished a workout, they might be really health-motivated.

The design of that product would be really different from someone at work at 3 pm who's maybe drinking it to gain motivation. So the emotional tensions consumers are feeling at different parts of the day influence the design of the product - everything from claims communication to brand to its features - how it should taste and feel.

Whether you're at a cash-strapped startup or you're working for a company that has a huge research budget, there are always ways for you to practice design thinking. It might be tapping into your already loyal consumers at the early stages or setting up expert and edge consumer interviews at larger companies.

Kristin: Can you explain what an “edge consumer interview” is? 

Stephanie: We did this a lot at IDEO. Imagine consumers sitting on a bell curve - mainstream is the center of that bell curve. Your edge consumers are gonna be on either side of it. They're going to be people who maybe are early adopters, heavy users, and they have a really clear point of view. If you're looking at consumers who only eat plant-based, for example, maybe your edge consumer is somebody who's a fruitarian or eats an extremely strict raw food diet. 

Another example could be a biohacker if you're making a nutritionally focused product. You're probably not going to actually end up designing for that biohacker, but they can articulate insights that a mainstream consumer who's maybe new to the category or new to this type of product won’t be able to in the same way.

At the end of the day, your product is likely going to fall more towards the center of the bell curve, but hearing the point of view from those people who are more on the edge can help define that.

Kristin: If you are in R&D and want to implement a more consumer-led approach, but are maybe facing resistance in your company, what advice would you give?

Stephanie: There are a couple of things I would advise. The first is to practice immersion research on your own, which I already talked about a little bit - you don't really need a budget for that. 

At IDEO, for example, you're on multiple projects a year. Sometimes the design challenges are in completely different industries, even. So you have to learn everything you can as fast as you can about a topic.

We did this by going out into the world. I think this is the number one thing I talk about - you can't get inspired when you're just within the same four walls that you're always working in. Going out into the world is where inspiration comes from.

Doing store walks, taking classes, even going down YouTube or Reddit rabbit holes, is a really valuable way to get immersed in the culture and landscape of whatever you're working on.

The second piece of advice I would give is practicing showing, not telling. You can write out a description of what you're envisioning, email it out, and probably get no responses from it because no one's excited by that. 

Or you could draw a picture, or even better, you can prototype it. And that will get people's attention.

That's actually one of IDEO’s brainstorming rules, which is to “be visual”.

Kristin: What role does rapid prototyping play in a consumer-led approach? You were doing this at IDEO. How does getting something physical in front of people change the quality of feedback you get?

Stephanie: We did a lot of what's called “sacrificial concept creation,” which is purposely pushing example concepts in one direction or another for the purpose of learning. You create a concept that pushes really hard on one element of what you're trying to learn. 

Maybe it's protein, because protein's a hot topic, and you really want to learn a lot about that, so you make an extremely protein-centric concept.

Creating them really early on and putting them in front of consumers not only gives them something to react to, but also helps you fail fast and start designing really early in the process - often before you've even made a product brief. That eventual product brief then is so much stronger because you've already done concept testing and gotten early direction from consumers.

The other concept we used to practice at IDEO a lot was called “build to think”.This involves making physical prototypes really early in the design process - usually immediately after brainstorming. It helps you crystallize the right shape, textures, size, packaging, etc. of the product. If you’re a developer, you can carve out time for your team to do this in the lab or kitchen. If you have more of a multidisciplinary team, you can use non-food materials like model magic, foam, popsicles, beads, paint - whatever you can find. It’s incredible how much creating these physical prototypes, even non-edible ones, builds excitement and momentum. You can feel your team gravitate towards certain ones.

Kristin: All right, last question. For someone early in their career in food science or R&D, what's one mindset shift that would make them significantly better at innovation?

Stephanie: Shifting your mindset from the identity of “I'm a food scientist” to “I can do more than just being on the bench”.

I firmly believe that any kind of breakthrough innovation happens when you bring together a team of people with diverse backgrounds and unique points of view. 

There's the Venn diagram of what makes a successful product, and its Desirability (does the consumer want it?), there's Viability (is it gonna make money?) and there's Feasibility (can we actually make it?).

As food scientists and engineers, we're bringing that critical lens of Feasibility into the process, ideally as early as possible. You’re also learning to make decisions with the consumer in mind from the jump. The shift is from being someone who makes products work to someone who helps define what the right product is, which, to me, is the most interesting part. 

Kristin: Thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today, Stephanie!

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