Stories
New product categories, new customer experiences, leadership, extracting a product's story, and learning from mistakes
Reinventing earbuds
Turning a prototype into an all-in bet on a new product category
The minute I tried out the first 3D print, I knew we had a game-changer on our hands. The earbuds category had a problem: earbuds with great audio got uncomfortable quickly. Meanwhile, people were walking around with one earbud in, sacrificing their music experience so they could hear the outside world. Bose had developed a technology to play private audio at a short distance from the ear with great quality, so we could solve these problems — but first we had to find the right form factor and prove that the problem mattered to enough customers. Suddenly, the prototyping team hit on a shape that could be perfect.
After advocating for that form factor concept in the early stages, I led the program from the time it was greenlit until I hired a senior product manager to take it over. As with all of my Bose products, my role was to oversee every aspect of the product — audio, comfort, target customer population, firmware, onboarding, app features, UX, marketing story, appearance, safety, profit margins, launch timing, buttons, charging case, battery life, claims, manufacturing quantities, and more — and how it all came together into one customer experience and business proposition.
My core achievement was my methodical approach to convincing Bose to bet big on a whole new category that could expand the earbud market and take us into a future where customers' digital and physical lives seamlessly merge. I used three key strategies to build consensus for an all-in launch: commissioning careful user research to prove we had a winning experience for the price; giving personal demos to stakeholders up and down the org chart; and using past case studies (like my prior Sport Open Earbuds product) to show that tentative, 'experimental' launches fail to get momentum. And the product is a hit.
Expertise Tags: Turning tech into product, ID your customer, Concept validation, Customer-in-the-loop iteration, Extracting the story, Tough tech tradeoffs, Perfect your UX, What/when to launch
Hardening a delicate invention for launch — and extracting the right story to hook customers
In a high-stakes moment for Bose's earbuds category — 6 months before the launch of our turnaround product — the CEO installed me as the new category leader. Reporting directly to her, I made a lot of critical decisions to steer that product toward success, but the most important focus area was the noise cancelling performance. Bose researchers had invented a new way to produce the most powerful noise cancelling the world had ever seen by personalizing the earbuds to each user — but could we launch it flawlessly? And would customers believe it?
I monitored a number of possible failure modes and made decisive hardware and software tradeoffs to improve our odds of success while preserving an amazing customer experience. I made the call to aim for a bold legal claim of the world's best noise cancelling, which we achieved. And when no one could explain how this magical new technology worked without deep jargon, I sat down with the inventors and wrote up an intuitive, accurate layman's explanation* that served as the basis for all of our marketing — including truly jaw-dropping demos I delivered at a marquee press event in New York.
Expertise Tags: Extracting the story, Tough tech tradeoffs, What/when to launch, Polished demos
The world's best noise cancellation
Links:
*One version of the layman's explanation: Sound Shaped to You: Bose CustomTune Technology
Bose QC Earbuds II Review: Best Noise Canceling, Bar None (CNET)