Product Development Process at Ecoation
Ecoation recently luanched a ground up redesign of our OKO CoBot, a product intended to lead the data revolution in controlled environment agriculture. Since launching in December of 2020, OKO sales are up astronomically, communicating much needed confirmation that the team is on track to meet and exceed customer’s expectations.
As the Product Design Manager leading that that project I was interviewed to provide an insight into the product development process the team and I used for delivery.
Walk me through the beginning stages of the product redesign and upgrades. What were the challenges that needed to be addressed?
OKO Tantalus was conceived as Ecoation's co-bot offering intended to lead the data revolution in controlled environment agriculture. It needed to provide the data to Ecoation's analytics platform that would enable actionable insights to growers, IPM managers and scouts while being suitable for high volume production and sale world wide. At the same time we wanted to take the opportunity to radically improve the image quality and provide much more detailed information on the environment in the greenhouse to continue building on the quantity and quality of insights we could offer though the final Software As a Service product.
To do this, we needed to undertake a ground-up redesign of the OKO hardware using everything we had learned from previous prototype products, develope new technologies to address a variety of technical challenges and conduct rigorous testing to ensure our device met all applicable standards and regulations as well as our own more stringent specifications for reliability and robustness.
We first broke the problem down into a set of requirements and began tackling the fundamental technology development of key sub-systems under NASA’s Technology Readyness Levels process and conflicting challenges under the product milestone process. To improve image quality I lead developement of an imaging system offering a 360* 8K view of the entire crop and to improve environmental data detail we developed a means of capturing temperature, humidity and CO2 levels at both the top and bottom of the canopy in every row, this solution we were eventually able to pattent so we have protected the competitive advantage this system provides. At the same time, we were actually able to minimise cost for our customers by making the new hardware retrofittable to the most popular models of existing scout cart and by using a modular approach to provide different hardware packages to ensure each customer could build a data collection system that was most optimal for their specific greenhouse.
In the process of addressing these challenges, 7 prototypes were created. How would you describe the evolution of the product?
Real prototypes are the best way of ensuring the final product really works for our customers, we use a product milestone process that is built around building and testing prototypes often, presenting the results at each of a number of milestones that iteratively require greater resolution of the product and project. Initial prototypes were often simple 3D printed or hand-made mockups of different approaches we might take to achieve our goals, but as we developed the new technologies required in parallel using NASA's Technology Readiness Levels, the resolution and performance of these prototypes continuously increased. Our first prototype that integrated all of the major sub-systems was created about 6 months into the project and intended only to demonstrate the performance we wanted for each function was feasible with the technologies and integration approach we had chosen. Once this milestone had been reached however, successive prototypes quickly optimised each function and began to add detail such as designing for specific manufacturing and assembly processes. We built a number of high resolution prototypes to undergo full system testing and field trials and used insights from these machines to build a quantity of final pre-production prototypes that were used to provide confidence that all machines built would pass all quality and regulatory testing.
What were the last 12 months like for you and your team? What are you most proud of looking back?
It has been busy thats for sure! There was a lot of work to be done, and there are no shortcuts when developing good quality hardware with brand new technology. Everything had to be carefully tested and optimised. In many cases we had to write and validate the test methods to ensure they really reflected the customer need as well. The whole team really stepped up, understood the customer need, and took ownership of the technical solutions they had to deliver to enable the final product. It really is impressive to think we started from a blank sheet of paper just 12 months ago and already have over 8 machines in the field seeing active use by customers every day and making a ready difference to their decision making process.