#8 - When data is at the heart of product design, good things happen

As eCommerce operators, we pore over endless digital strategies and platforms — debate them widely on X or LinkedIn — and then rehash and recycle our thoughts until we’re pale in the face. But we spend so much time marketing products, we often overlook how the physical products are made. Unless you’re Mike De Santis.

The Managing Director at Doris Dev, a NYC-based product design and development firm, and Co-founder of Canopy, makers of the world’s cleanest humidifiers, diffusers and shower heads, Mike is a jack-of-all-trades in eCommerce.

Our pieces usually cover the digital world, but today, Mike brought us into the physical, going deep into Canopy’s product design process, and how they went from concept on a sketchpad, to the world-class humidifier many know and love today. Enjoy.

🎯 The TL;DR of our conversation 🎯 

1. The product design process functions best like a “treadmill,” with continuous iterations and trade-off decisions. Here, Mike talks about a fascinating real-world example of difficult trade-offs made while the Canopy humidifier was being brought to market.

2. Market a system, not just your products: take advantage of your unique product features with co-marketing opportunities (i.e. Canopy’s aroma partnerships) that further expand your reach to new audiences.

3. For new brands, it’s important to measure how fast you can get your product to market, and also the best way to ensure you don’t run into waste and exorbitant costs at your warehouses.

4. Defect rate is the single most important KPI for measuring the health & consistency of your production lines.

⭐️ North Star Metric & Key Data Tools ⭐️ 

North Star Metric:

Mike advises that product design folks focus on NPS (Net Promoter Score) in collaboration with their CX & Customer Support counterparts to holistically understand customer sentiment and product feedback.

Key Data Tools:

Gorgias - A mainstay platform in eComm, Gorgias is a CX and product design team’s one-stop-shop for tagging and flagging customer feedback or issues, and quickly identifying issues with upstream production lines — which Mike stresses can save bottomline costs.

Factored Quality - A Doris Dev-incubated startup that helps brands get quality control to their factory frontline.

For more from Mike and other Don’t V*LOOKUP guests, don’t forget to check out our YouTube channel, or listen on Spotify or Apple.