When I was a kid, I had a lot of Hot Wheels. If you’ve ever watched our podcast, you will have noticed a few on the shelf behind me.
Two of my favorites: a De Tomaso Pantera and a 1962 Corvette.
Just one little problem: They aren’t Hot Wheels. They are Matchbox cars.
At the time, it seemed like all the best ones were Matchbox. Heavier cars, smoother rolling, cooler paint jobs.
Perhaps it was my imagination.
But: Hot Wheels are definitely back. In fact, the Financial Times published “How Hot Wheels became ‘the largest auto manufacturer out there’.”
I noticed something about its description of the toy company. You know what’s not in the article? Manufacturing.
It’s a design world.
The articles gives great details about how the company comes up with their models each year. If you didn’t know what firm they were talking about, you might think the article described a luxury goods company.
The process involves partnering with companies for licenses, digitally sculpting in 3D using pens, rapid prototyping … even making alterations to the real-life car’s proportions so its lines better pops in miniature.
These are many of the concepts involved in “design thinking.” Explaining the design mindset and process is well beyond the scope of this blog, but there are common elements of design thinking that creep into the work of anyone striving to improve a thing or tackle a problem. Examples: research, small-scale tests and using the tests’ feedback to tweak as you go.
The description of the Hot Wheels process wraps up with a brief note that “it’s off to the factory before the process starts again: 129 more times throughout the year.”
Now, a manufacturing process requires “design thinking” too. Just ask any manufacturing engineer.
Hot Wheels may be the largest car maker out there, but Toyota has some chops. It is responsible for introducing much of the West to kaizen, continuous improvement, which has much to do with design thinking.
I know an engineer who left Toyota for another blue-chip company. He was excited because his new employer’s current manufacturing was so new that he saw massive opportunities for design thinking to improve the assembly lines.
But for Hot Wheels, I’m sure that’s all outsourced. Making the toy is perhaps an afterthought. Designing the toy is key.
It’s an experience world.
Well, design is key, and so is user experience.
I think a death knell for Hot Wheels would be if kids–and parents–started thinking of toy cars as commodities. They are commodities, of course. All toy cars are the same size, similar materials, wheels that roll.
But Hot Wheels is different. There is something American-cool about them. The packaging, as well as the product, show that it is different.
And so do the playlets. From day 1 Hot Wheels has sold racing track. The latest crop is incredibly modular and immersive.
And innovative (that’s design thinking again). My kids have really enjoyed this up-the-wall track that makes use of 3M Command Strips to stick to the wall. (You’ve perhaps heard that 3M’s sticky products are another example of design thinking.)
Some fans treat the toys as if they are the actual hot rods that the company originally miniaturized: switching out wheels, adding graphite to axles, and collecting certain makes and models.
Our garbage collectors’ sons love doing this and developed a Christian ministry around the fun. I’m guessing nobody at Hot Wheels could have predicted that as part of its market. It is user experience in the real world.
Still, Hot Wheels, as part of their design process, surely studies all this. And they add their own experiences to it:
Hot Wheels started hosting car shows for its 50th anniversary in 2018. The winner of the show gets his or her car shrunken down to a Hot Wheels toy. And the shows continue. Last year there were over 10 shows–and yes, the cars look incredibly cool.
Are you designing your experience?
During the shutdowns I had the opportunity to take a class on human-centered design from the legendary design firm IDEO (everything from Apple’s mouse to the first notebook computer to kids’ toothbrushes to whiteboards in hospital rooms to …).
I see three takeaways in all of this, no matter if you work in a factory, a service business, a government office or a charity.
First: America is screwed! We don’t manufacture anymore!
Just kidding. Had to get that out of my system.
Actual first: Have enough humility to research. You have to get in the shoes of your users.
How do they approach your product or service? What are they thinking and feeling as they do so? What are their behaviors? Why?
This goes beyond checking your customer survey scores. Frankly, I’m not sure Hot Wheels could scientifically survey children.
Instead, you’ll have to do things like observing your customers in the field. Mapping the process they (not you) go through to make use of your product or service.
And, as Toyota has trained many of us, keeping asking “Why?” until you identify the root cause of a behavior or problem.
What can you do today to research your users’ experiences?
Second: Have enough humility to imagine. The answer to your opportunity for innovation or for problem-solving is probably hiding in another industry, or another way of thinking.
3M’s failed attempt at glue was a blessing for the Christian coworker who needed a way to mark his hymnal. And Hot Wheels’s toys were inspiration for real-life, gas-powered toys.
If you take the tour of Toyota’s Georgetown, Ky. plan, you’ll hear that employees on the assembly line figured out a need for a certain kind of seat to help speed up part of the manufacturing process. The seat? The kind of you find in a bass boat. How very Kentucky.
What can you do today to imagine answers from outside your line of work?
Third: Have enough humility to fail. Business, like life, rarely happens in the home run. It’s the singles and doubles.
Consistent effort. Constantly tweaking. Getting into the habit of trying out a tweak, seeing what worked, then trying out the next tweak.
What can you do today to try out an adjustment to your work?
It should be clear that all three of these takeaways overlaps. They need each other to work.
But I hope you take at least one of them and see what you can do to implement it.