Designing and making a new product? Learn from a movie production and the law of large numbers
The film producer of “Get Out” — a movie that was produced with $4.5m budget and went on to gross $150m million and win an Oscar — follows a very strict philosophy: before starting to shoot the movie they set a specific budget for each of the movies they will produce and each movie is assigned the same budget. This is based on one key fact: you cannot know for certain which movie will be a success. The second part of the philosophy is that once the filmmaker runs out of budget they will stop the production and wrap things up where they are. Any requests for an additional budget is turned down because the film-maker is not been able to know in advance how much improvement can be generated with the extra budget. Other movies received the same love — i.e. budget — and they made it work so adding extra budget would be falling trap of the sunk cost: since you invested so much time already, you incorrectly think that some extra time wouldn’t be a big extra cost
The reason behind this philosophy is the laws of large number applied to moviemaking: keep your budget small for each movie so that you can make more movies and increase your chances of producing a blockbuster — since you can’t handpick in advance which one will succeed. When we were making one of our sofa models at Moko this philosophy came to mind.
This concept 1 (this is a 3D image) presented a lot of design challenges:: the thin mattresses (the parts in darker gray) are removable and were so hard to upholster because they had a shape that our upholstery team was not used to stitch, the comfort in the back didn’t feel quite right for a long time, and those mattresses were not shaping around the body as smoothly as we hoped — also once I sat on it in early phase of the iteration the wood frame just cracked: I guess destiny was trying to tell us something. It took us more headspace and prototyping time than the other concepts we were developing at the same time. So I wondered if it would have made sense to use the Get Out strategy and stop the iteration after a certain number of hours that we had set at the beginning: every sofa would receive the same amount of love and after that, we would stop the rounds of iteration. I’m not quite sure if that approach could have worked for that situation or if it’s the right approach to take at all. But my takeaway is that when we will develop a new product I will keep the following questions in mind:
- How can we justify spending more time on one product/collection vis-a-vis another product? Why spending 2 extra days on concept 1 is better spent than on a second concept?
- How can we (and can we at all) quantify what outcome can we realistically expect from extra time we’re expecting to invest? For example, if we want to put two extra days of iteration, what is an outcome that we were previously able to generate in that amount of time? How many tests we need to run to achieve our goal (e.g. fix the comfort in the back) and would those 2 days be enough?
- If there are no “competing” products where we could allocate the extra time is there any other tasks that could benefit from that time e.g. should we focus the extra 2 days on ensuring that our sofas can be manufactured at scale?
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