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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian Lofermento, and I'll tell you what there's long been an industry that I've been fascinated by, for the way that they think and the way that they view solutions, and that is I'm going to say these words.
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It's going to sound very simple, but we're going to go deep in today's conversation.
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That is the product industry.
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People who work on products view products as solutions and I think they're very intentional about their language, because a product doesn't necessarily mean a business.
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They fully recognize the differences in how these all play together to bring real-life solutions to the marketplace and move society forward.
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And that's why, for today's interview and episode, we have gone out and found an incredible guest.
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The way that this guy approaches new product development, you'll see that he values the quality of products.
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He values the speed to market, which, for all of us as entrepreneurs, we need to be thinking about these things and he really values the process, from start to finish, of actually putting things into the world, not just ideas.
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So let me tell you all about today's guest.
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His name is Rami Ibrahim.
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Rami is an engineer and innovation leader.
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He has developed over 70, seven zero, over 70 products, from concept to long-term portfolio management.
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He holds multiple patents.
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He's generated over $250 million in sales from his products.
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The last five years he spent as the global director of innovation at Halma, which is an FTSE 100 company.
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He's now the founder of Impossible Innovation, helping companies build even more successful products.
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We're all going to learn a lot, not only from the way that Rami talks about his work, but the way that he thinks in business terms and the way that he sees solutions coming to the marketplace.
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So I'm not going to say anything else.
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I'm excited about this one.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Rami Ibrahim.
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All right, rami, I'm so excited that you're here with us today.
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First things first.
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Welcome to the show.
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Thanks, thanks, brian.
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I'm really happy to be here.
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Heck.
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Yes, I didn't even say in your bio, but we have a few other things in common as well.
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We share a past in Boston, in Los Angeles.
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Obviously, we both love business.
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So, to kick things off, take us beyond the bio.
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Who's Rami?
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How'd you start doing all these cool things?
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So you know, for me it all started when I was, when I was a kid.
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My dad's an engineer, um, and I used to watch him design things and he'd show me the things that he designed and they'd they'd be there and to me that was absolutely mesmerizing, right.
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I knew.
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I knew early in my life that I wanted to build the things that didn't exist, and then I've been fortunate enough in my career to have ended up in places where they wanted me to build impossible things and building new products and bringing them to market and doing all these things.
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So that has taken me from Canada to Los Angeles, to Europe, to China, to Asia.
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I've worked all over with all sorts of companies doing all sorts of amazing things, and I'm happy to share some of that stuff with you here today.
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Yes, I'm so excited amazing things and I'm happy to share some of that stuff with you here today.
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Yes, I'm so excited for that and, trust me, I'm going to pick into that brain because I love the way that you think and even in your own brand.
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We're definitely going to talk about your own business today because I love the way that your business shows up in the world and even the messaging.
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It's a very hopeful message about what's possible with product.
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But that's why I want to start with that very word first, rami, you heard me tease it at the top of this episode about the way that your industry uses that word product.
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I feel like a lot of people think you know a product has to be a business Like I'm inventing the new Uber and they view the product as the entirety of the business.
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What is product?
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Why is your industry so intentional about the way that you use that word?
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What is product?
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Why is your industry so intentional about the way that you use that word?
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So it's so intentional because the thing that you build itself right on its own is not enough.
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The product or the piece of hardware or the piece of software that you build, if that's all you're focused on when you bring that to market, if that's all you've thought about, it will never be enough.
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And so the idea of building a product really starts way, way at the beginning of really focusing on what's the business problem that we're trying to solve for the customer.
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Not the technical problem right, that's the second piece.
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But really, what is the business problem that we're trying to solve?
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So when I was at do engineering and we were building products for airlines, the question of what is the problem we're solving for them went from oh, we want to help them move people around easier and make the people, the passengers, happier to no, that's not really where the focus is.
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The focus is on they value aircraft utilization much more.
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So really, what we're trying to do from a product perspective is help them improve aircraft utilization.
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That's the business problem.
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How we do that is the product.
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And so the business problem yields the solution and the technical problem yields the specs, and if you can't answer what the business problem you're solving is for the customer, then all you have are a bunch of specs and they all look equally important, and then the product has no purpose or has very little purpose.
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Yeah, rami, I've never asked an engineer.
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This next question.
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It's a quote that I've long referenced, and it's going to be even more fun to talk about this quote with you, and that is you went straight to the customer, of course, and I love that, because what I found in all the conversations I get to have is every great marketer goes straight to the prospect, goes straight to the people that we're meant to serve.
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Here we are talking about product.
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You did the exact same thing with us here today.
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Think about the actual person or the business that you're looking to solve their real life problems.
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And here's the quote that I've never asked an engineer about, rami.
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I think back to that Henry Ford quote where he said if I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.
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Where in the process is an engineer like you who says, okay, I understand your problems, but I'm the one who's going to come up with a solution.
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So I love that quote so much and I actually use it when I'm working with customers.
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So here's the reality Customers have no idea what they want.
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What they have a really good understanding of is what they need.
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And so my job as an engineer, my job as a product builder is not to listen to what the customer says they want, but to uncover the need that they actually have.
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And in that quote, in that Henry Ford quote you, the need is right there.
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What they wanted was faster.
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That's the actual need the customer had.
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They had, they needed faster.
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How to achieve faster?
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That's our job as engineers, as inventors.
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So the idea is to go beyond what a customer says they want.
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Here's.
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Here's an example.
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I was working with a company.
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I was helping them build a new generation of oxygen delivery devices.
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So they're a medical company, and when we were doing the early kind of testing with customers, one of the things they told us was don't touch the user interface.
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Make it the same, similar to all the other devices that people are used to, because we don't want to have to retrain, we don't want to have to re-explain to them, we don't want it to be unfamiliar, we just want the user interface to be the same.
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They were super clear about that, right.
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What we continued to do was uncover the need.
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Why can't you retrain?
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What is the problem?
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What are the issues there?
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And what came out of it is that they don't have enough staff.
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They don't have enough staff.
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They don't have enough time.
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Right, hospitals are stressed already with all the million other things that they need to do.
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So what the team then did was we designed the user interface.
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We completely redesigned it to look like a mobile app, because people didn't need to be trained on on using a mobile app.
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They already knew and were familiar with how to do that.
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When we did the initial screenshots and went back and showed them to customers, they were like oh my God, that's exactly what we want.
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That's amazing, even though that's exactly the opposite of what they said they wanted, right?
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So the trick is to not just take what the customer says at face value.
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Dig deeper until you get to the real problem, and then you can come up with a solution that actually solves it.
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Yeah, I love the way you strip that Henry Ford quote down, because, you're right, I've never really paid attention to the solution was already there, even in that very basic quote of faster, which leads me to well, in the quote we're talking about a faster horse, whereas Henry Ford looked at that and said Well, I don't just want to improve upon a horse, I don't want to modify a horse in any way.
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I want to come up with something completely new, which, of course, takes us to a big part of your industry and your personal work, which is innovation.
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And, rami, I'll fully transparently call this out here on the air.
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I don't usually like buzzwords.
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I feel like everyone uses certain buzzwords way too much in the world of business.
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You're a rare case and, especially having gone through your website, having gone through your work, you love innovation, you see new, and I think that's what we need to call out when it comes to innovation.
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Talk to us about that newness, because, even just piggybacking off the Henry Ford example, how do we decide when, oh, we just need to improve upon something that already exists, ie a faster horse, versus we've got to go straight to the drawing board and start from scratch and come up with something entirely new.
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So, okay, that's a really good question and for me, I don't believe in building products for the sake of building products and I don't believe in innovating for the sake of innovating.
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Um, building new products or deciding to innovate or deciding just to add one new feature, has to all stem down and come back to alignment with the strategy for what the company is trying to achieve.
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So if we, if our strategy is to just make a small incremental growth year over year, then just make small incremental growth year over year, then the risks of taking big steps and big bets on innovation maybe is not needed, right?
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And then if an engineering team tries to do that, then you're at odds with the rest of how the organization is trying to work and so that doesn't work, and the opposite is also true.
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So for me, when deciding what are we going to do, how are we going to plan out the product roadmap for the next three or four or five years?
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Where I start is always with what is the strategy for the company that we're trying to achieve and how are we going to grow?
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And then the products and the services that we build have to align to allow us to achieve that.
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They both have to stand, they both have to align, and so if we're planning on having an aggressive growth, if we want to double in size every five years, then I need to have products that are going to deliver on that, that are going to be aggressive in the market as well.
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Yeah, rami, hearing you talk about these things.
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I'm a visual person, so when people talk, I typically visualize things in my head.
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And hearing you use terms like roadmap, I picture you truly as an architect.
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And here's exactly why Because it seems to me like, when you're building a product, all of us as end consumers and kind of, quite frankly, an impatient generation, is that we all want the result, we want that final structure, we want to see the building completely done.
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It just seems to me like somehow, from your vantage point, you have both the patience and the technical know-how to say look, this is what iteration one is going to look like, this is version one and we're going to go to market with that and that's precisely where we need to be.
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But at the same time, you also have that bigger blueprint or roadmap, and you understand that.
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What's that process like?
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We always again coming back to buzzwords.
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We've all heard the term MVP before.
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It's something that, in the business world, we're all familiar with.
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How do you decide what that roadmap looks like along the way, instead of just being part of our immediate gratification society?
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So it does.
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It does require patience and it requires it requires vision, but most importantly, it requires to have discipline.
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So when I start looking and thinking about a product roadmap, I don't think about products that I'm going to build.
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It's easy to get lost in that.
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So the way that I think about it is what are the customer problem that I want to go out and solve and what is the second problem that I want to solve and what is the third problem?
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And then my product roadmap then looks like a cluster of problems that I will iterate on, rather than I'm going to build sensor A today and then sensor B tomorrow and then a third sensor and a fourth sensor, et cetera.
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So that's where I start.
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So, for example, when I was at Do, my mindset very much shifted from hey, here's three products that I'm going to build, and they were all Jetways, because the point of the company was to help move people right.
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That mindset shifted to the problem we want to do is automate the gate for airlines.
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So everything that happens at an airport gate should be automated.
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And once that problem was defined, then a whole slew of products and possibilities stemmed from it.
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So we built a jetway, we built an automated aircraft parking system.
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We built a gate information system that allowed everybody to see what was happening at every gate at the airport, way before you know the concept of IoT and those types of things existed.
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So that's where it starts for me.
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And then the discipline part comes in.
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We're not going to boil the ocean all in one shot.
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We're going to find out what is the main value that we can provide a customer today, and we're going to provide that value, and it needs to be enough value for them to buy.
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And then the plan is to add features at a relentless rate.
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Whether it's hardware or software, it doesn't really matter.
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The idea is to then have relentless speed and execution.
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Yeah, I love the way you articulate that, rami, because I feel, like a lot of us, we have the tendency, just societally and professionally, to have a to-do list, whereas it sounds like you are not married to a to-do list of I need to do this project and I need to do this project.
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What I'm really hearing is, when you approach anything, you are always solution-based, problem-focused and solution-based, and I think that it truly is a different way of thinking, which is why I teased it at the top of today's episode I wanna go into.
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It's something that I found a lot in the messaging of your company, which I love your brand, impossible Innovation.
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There's so much good that you're putting into the world and it's so clear how business-oriented you are.
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Again, talking about the problems that you're solving, you actually think about your customers.
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I want to go straight to that word that you just used, which is we want to build all these features relentlessly, and you want to do it quickly.
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Speed matters, rami, and that's why I've been so excited to have this conversation with you today, because I feel like in this generation, we have so many heck, we're on the entrepreneur to entrepreneur podcast.
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What's a better example of a lack of speed than wantrepreneurs.
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They're sitting there measuring, assessing, analyzing, studying, learning, consuming content.
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They're doing all of these things.
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And so, when I look at your business, rami, you're not just about saving people money, you're not just about eliminating risk and new product development.
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You're not just about having great products.
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Speed is clearly part of your approach to it.
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Talk to us about that, because I feel like it's an undervalued asset that we all have in our businesses.
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Hugely, hugely, brian.
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I think the biggest strategic thing that you can do as a business whether you're a startup or you've been around for 20 years or you've been around for 50 years building speed into the organization is the single best strategic thing that you can do, because it means you can adapt fast, you can learn fast, you can pivot fast, you can execute fast, you can make a mistake fast and then fix it fast, like speed is is such an important part of of not just what I do, but what I think every organization should do.
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When I was at AccuDynamics, one of the things that we struggled with our customers we were a contract manufacturer, so customers came to us to build them the things that they've designed.
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And the way that it worked was they come to us for prototyping and then, if you make it because everything that we built for them was FDA approved once you're part of the FDA approval, you're locked in for production.
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But if you didn't get in on the ground floor during prototyping, you didn't make it into production and you missed out on all that revenue.
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Our problem was that we were slow in prototyping.
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We were really slow.
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We were like 12 week turnaround time and I spent time with my customers understanding, okay, what is the real thing that you guys want to achieve here?
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And I figured out and understood what their development cycle looks like and I told my team we're going to cut down our prototyping time from 12 weeks down to three.
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And everybody thought it was was crazy.
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Everybody thought it was such a ridiculous thing to say they're like we were already struggling at 12, how do we get to three?
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But we we looked at the problems, we looked at our structure, we looked at the way we're gonna do things.
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We decided to make speed at strategic initiative for us.
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We implemented scrum in a manufacturing environment, in a prototyping environment, and we slowly over the next six months, cut that down from 12 to three and the transformation that that had on our ability to then service our customers when you contract.
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I mean there were months where the prototyping team of four people was making just as much revenue as the company as a whole.
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So it became a huge driving strategy for us um and it it.
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It doesn't matter whether you're providing a service or um, you're building a product.
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Speed is super important.
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Look, look at what amazon has done to um, to everything.
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Right, we now expect everything to ship next day.
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We expect things to ship same day, and that's why they dominate.
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They constantly push the envelope of what speed means.
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Yeah, it's true to the point where, as consumers, if I see something that is going to arrive in four days, I'm impatient.
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At this point, I'll say I'll just get it on Amazon instead, because it truly is.
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That's the level set, the expectation.
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Hearing you talk about speed, though obviously it's something that I've already teased the fact that we're the immediate gratification society these days.
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We all want things immediately.
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So, rami, my obvious question to you is why?
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Why are we so bad at being fast in the things that we're deploying into the world?
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Is it perfectionism?
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Is it just pure logistics?
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I'd love to hear some insights.
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Why is speed so hard?
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Yeah, so this is, and because speed is such an important thing for me and I've had the chance to work with like a lot of companies, right, I get firsthand view of where the issues are.
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There's a few things that affect this.
00:19:19.028 --> 00:19:24.346
One is the actual process that the company is using.
00:19:24.346 --> 00:19:35.763
So if their processes are slow, if the way they make decisions are slow, then the byproduct of that everything happens slowly.
00:19:35.763 --> 00:19:36.997
That's one.
00:19:36.997 --> 00:19:42.185
The second part has to do with access to information.
00:19:42.185 --> 00:19:48.005
So you know how sometimes you have too much data that it becomes analysis by paralysis, right.
00:19:48.005 --> 00:19:49.208
The opposite is also true.
00:19:49.208 --> 00:19:58.925
When you don't have enough data, you're not really sure what decisions to make, and so you constantly push back with decision making because you feel uncomfortable with the risk at hand.
00:19:58.925 --> 00:20:03.184
So that slows things down.
00:20:03.184 --> 00:20:07.604
And then the third part is empowering the team.
00:20:07.604 --> 00:20:13.960
Is the team empowered to actually make the decisions, or does everything have to funnel all the way up and then funnel back all the way down?
00:20:13.960 --> 00:20:23.938
So these are all things that have to do with how fast and how quickly a team can implement things.
00:20:25.442 --> 00:20:33.278
Let me give you this is an interesting example of how speed can have a huge impact on what actually happens.
00:20:33.278 --> 00:21:25.230
I was part of a big company group and we had a company that did software for the fire industry and they had a competitor and the competitor was their processes and and their ability to implement new features was so fast that every time our company, which was the incumbent, which was the guys who who were innovating with new ideas all the time, every time our company, which was the incumbent, which was the guys who were innovating with new ideas all the time, every time they came up with a new feature, the other guys would copy them within a week or two and they had that relentless speed, the relentless ability to just take what was there and just duplicate it, and that became so disheartening for our company and our team that they had to go back and relook and retool how quickly they could make decisions on how can they actually bring ideas and features to market.
00:21:25.230 --> 00:21:33.126
So it's structural within the whole organization.
00:21:33.748 --> 00:21:34.489
Yeah, I love that.
00:21:34.489 --> 00:21:36.377
I love the way that you look at it again, rami.
00:21:36.377 --> 00:21:38.682
It's just, it's the engineer's mind in action.
00:21:38.682 --> 00:21:43.410
For us here in today's conversation is you have an orderly way of looking at things.
00:21:43.410 --> 00:21:44.438
So much of it.
00:21:44.438 --> 00:21:45.922
I'm gonna drop another quote here.
00:21:45.922 --> 00:21:47.526
I'm curious if you've ever came across it.
00:21:47.526 --> 00:21:52.596
It's an Abraham Lincoln quote where he says if you want me to give a five-hour speech, I'm ready to go right now.
00:21:52.596 --> 00:21:56.201
If you want me to give a five-minute speech, I'm going to need five hours to prepare.
00:21:56.642 --> 00:22:05.037
And I've always thought that concept is so counterintuitive and funny, because that's the hard part is stripping away so much of it.
00:22:05.037 --> 00:22:13.276
And here I was ahead of you and I hitting record together today, thinking gosh, rami probably has a long running list of like a million things that could be solutions in the world.
00:22:13.276 --> 00:22:26.304
But what I'm starting to appreciate is your ability to trim away all the excess, to trim away all of the noise, whether we're talking data, whether we're talking process, and it sounds like bureaucracy is layered into all of those things.
00:22:26.304 --> 00:22:30.549
You've worked at so many different companies, rami, and so it is about stripping all that away.
00:22:30.549 --> 00:22:32.455
What's your process look like for that?
00:22:32.455 --> 00:22:40.567
Because I've always imagined you, product developers and creators, having a whiteboard with a million sticky notes and putting more on as opposed to taking them off.
00:22:40.567 --> 00:22:43.155
Rami, how do you start stripping all this stuff away?
00:22:43.916 --> 00:22:44.878
yeah, so that's, that's a.
00:22:44.878 --> 00:22:45.240
That's a.
00:22:45.240 --> 00:22:46.682
That's a brilliant question.
00:22:46.682 --> 00:22:53.480
Um, for me, the, the process that I use, is um, simplify, simplify, simplify.
00:22:53.480 --> 00:23:07.140
Every product, every, every concept, every solution out there has two or three main features that provide the bulk of the value for the customer.
00:23:07.140 --> 00:23:20.739
And so the trick is to trim it down, figuring out, working with the customer diligently to figure out where is the real value in what we propose to build for you, and then everything else becomes noise.
00:23:20.739 --> 00:23:22.964
All the other features right.
00:23:22.964 --> 00:23:27.724
If they don't directly allow me to provide that value for the customer, then why am I building it?
00:23:27.724 --> 00:23:45.000
And so, when you think about building an instrument that has that could possibly have a hundred features, there's probably only five that the customer really cares about.
