For most of the last week, I've been working in product design, believe it or not.
Maybe this is just a narrative that I tell myself or stories that I make up to make myself sound important, but a big part of what I've been doing is deciding what we have and what we don't have within the clinic and within the education portfolio of our work here.
The first (and biggest task of the time) has been the designing and redesigning of everything related to business education following the integration of Chris Barrow's business into The Campbell Academy and its business education portfolio.
This has meant that it's been really important to look deeply at what we provide,
why we provide it,
whom we provide it for,
what it costs,
what we're trying to achieve.
The research into this has been quite extensive, looking at the overall market, deciding where the pain points are and how we can help as much as possible, but also travelling around to Chris's 100 group and speaking to them personally and with the team in order to make sure we start to understand what they need and want and will buy.
This is the essence of product design: understanding that you have a product which fills a hole in the market, cures people's pain, and helps them to a better place.
On another note, we're looking at different products in the clinic which have been offered to us, particularly through suppliers and equipment that's possible to integrate. Much of the time we get this type of stuff for free from suppliers because we have a presence and we have a lot of people that come through the clinic who'll be able to see what we're doing.
This includes things like printing, milling, scanning, lasers and airflow technology.
It's interesting to look at this stuff because a lot of the time my associates who are very keen to integrate new products will just tell us to add it to the existing product cycle, i.e., not to charge for it and just to give added value to the patient.
This is absolutely the worst way to look at product design.
Imagine that you were working at a toy company, a multinational, and your product designers came up with a toy and presented it to the board where you were sitting at the head of the table. If they said to you, “Why don't we just give this toy to all the children in the world for nothing?”, what would be your likely response?
Understanding the commercial side of bringing a product into your business (your practice), the cost of this, the potential benefit of this, and the potential profit related to the provision of it, as well as a system that applies to it, is fundamentally important and a fundamentally important thing to understand clearly.
I've watched dentistry over the last 20 to 25 years just scrabble to put products into their businesses without any understanding of whether it fits their clients' (patients’) or their premises or the existing systems that they have.
The best thing that you can do before you bring something into your practice like this is to sit down with a bit of paper and write the pros and cons and the likely advantages (from a realistic amount being done).
It’s a fascinating thing, product design, but it's based around the premise that “not all business is good business”, and that's worth repeating to yourself.