174: Agile Product Development & Additive Manufacturing

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/

Instagram | LinkedIn | Facebook Page | Facebook Group | Pinterest | Twitter | YouTube

Mako Design Links:

https://www.makodesign.com/

YouTube | Instagram | LinkedIn | Facebook | Pinterest | Twitter

Kevin Mako Links:

Instagram | LinkedIn | Quora | <