Lessons from reinventing the wheel
2022 Book Note #1
Freshly relocated from southern California, I found my first gloomy Christmas holiday in Seattle brought my inner bookworm back from hibernation. After many hours spent on my chaise, walking on the treadmill, and sitting beside the snow-jamming window, I finished reading an “outdated” tech biography — Reinventing the Wheel (By Steve Kemper, 2003) — narrating the innovation and production of Segway (code-named Ginger) led by Dean Kamen. This once overly hyped product faded away rapidly and completely ended production 18 months ago. The lucky rendezvous of this book makes it possible to unravel the questions: why do we rarely see people riding Segway on the sidewalk since it was launched, though it was announced by Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos to be bigger than PC? And what can we learn from its business failure, in the era of building a next-gen computing platform for Metaverse?
Over-design
Back in 1997, the basic concept of self-balancing on Segways was inspired by another invention from DEKA (Dean Kamen’s research lab) — the wheelchair Fred — which climbs stairs by rolling two sets of wheels. Dean’s business acumen told him the technology was going to revolutionize human mobility, should it have been applied to a new personal commute device. Instead of installing two sets of wheels, his designers devised a Segway to have horizontally parallel wheels and a T-shape bar for steering, a seemingly minimalist design offloaded the complexity of self-balancing all to the sensors and algorithms. Remember, we didn’t know what reinforcement learning is back in the late 90s and every users’ scenario, endangering or not, were “handcrafted” by engineers in the codebase, which failed to work and caused a slew of customer injuries and death, given the non-linear nature of Segways’ control system and environment. (Just for your notes, the acquirer of Segway Inc., Jimi Heselden, died riding a Segway off a cliff.)
The problem of over-design typically comes from the A-list engineering team and star engineers. They target the north star mission by demanding every aspect of the product as perfect as possible, ignoring the tradeoff coming from complexity and usability. This is why we see E-scooters, a way simpler vehicle, ridden mainly by teenagers cruising through bustling downtown usually without bruises; they offload the balancing partially to cerebrum instead to take on the unpredictable surroundings all by man-made circuits. Over-design made the engineering costs soar and delayed the release of Segway dramatically. It eventually led to a “jaw-on-the-ground” high price tag and a series of down-round VC funding that taxed Dean the control of the company.
The design lesson we learned is, don’t over-design. Though drawing the fine line between well-design and over-design requires discretion, users’ feedback, fast iteration, and on-schedule release would never become obsolete when it comes to building great products. To prevent the over-design, we should first avoid overly-confined features, overly-enlarged user scope, and unchecked costs of goods. “Getting done is more important than being perfect” is particularly true for the first generation of products.
Deaned
In DEKA, people would observe Dean Kamen storming their lab by dropping “nonsense” design viewpoints and asking engineers to test them by the end of the day. Once, he demanded his engineers to wrap the T-bar with fluffy bubbles that prevent hurting pedestrians in an accident. Thus, the director of the Segway project, Doug Field, coined the term “We are Deaned!”. He did it so many times that he forgot to check back with his requests, and engineers learned to brush him off over time. (Who would jump onto the wagon of Segway wrapped by fluffy bubbles?)
The impromptu changes from management normally concern the high-level design and cause harmful cascading alterations. All high-level design and low-level foundations should be calibrated and tested in the early stages across teams. All changes after that phase should be made by keeping in mind that later in the stage they are made, the larger the price comes with changes. Management, PMs, and Engineers all need to soul-search if the change offsets the benefits it brings afterward. Dean might not agree, but unlike jazz and stand-up comedy, improvisation is not welcome here.
Marginalized as a toy
The marketing director, Mike Ferry, once defined the targeting customers to be 18–35 years old tech-fanatic young demographics, but the last thing Dean wanted to see is Segways are marginalized as a toy for teenagers. The total addressable market in his mind is everyone who needs to mobilize, however, in the hindsight, we understand a moving vehicle without a shelter and storage cannot fit in everybody’s commute.
My question is: Why cannot Segway be a toy, at least in the first several iterations? According to the history of tech innovation, the first batch of adopters is typically a small group of tech-savvy professionals, who would become seeding users if their requirements are fulfilled. Triaging their hero use case, instead of blindly fitting the product to the mass user market, brings way more driven growth forces. A well-defined target audience is a key to adding and axing product features by Occam’s razor.
The idea is cheap, show me your UX
Like Steve Jobs, Dean was stubborn about keeping Segway secret in fear of automobile giants leapfrogging in production had they known the idea. He turned down all the relentless requests from the director of marketing, Mike Ferry, for the permission of the user experience survey for design and pricing until very close to massive production and the launch date. The wide range of user feedback only flew into design documents in the following generations, by which the competitor products were released anyway on the market.
Why do people use Facebook instead of Friendster, Instagram instead of MySpace, Google instead of Yahoo, Tik-Tok rather than Triller? Better user experience, not the idea, as all the former were late to the party! The first-mover advantage doesn’t offer you much edge, as competitors would always sneak in despite the patent protection and stealth mode. Only the smooth scrolls and turns, exquisite fonts and palette, and well-thought-out features make the product stand out!
Influence, not control
The leadership principle in DEKA is clear-cut: Everything went through Dean! Ranging from new hires’ signing bonus, every engineers’ stock options, to marketers’ first-class flight ticket to Tokyo, an excellent engineer as Dean is accustomed to controlling as many details as possible in the company’s operation, however, not scalable when it grows to a behemoth.
When micromanagement mentally exhausts everybody in the org, management ought to put guide rails on the operating details (Methodology for decision-making, Salary formula, Business expense limits, etc.). Outstanding leaders influence, not control, the organization by examples and regulations, since nobody has total control of the modern company after a series of VC funding and introducing board members.
Though not being relevant anymore, Segway has triggered a range of innovations, such as Onewheel and E-Unicycle, that profoundly affect people’s commuting in one way or another. And the genius story of Segway and lessons learned from its innovation, production, and leadership would be ever relevant in the present tech world.