Instead of a generic 'ideation' phase, Rainbird's stage-gate process begins with a 'Basis of Interest.' This forces teams to articulate *why* a problem is interesting and worth solving for customers and the business before defining a solution.
Rainbird live-streamed customer focus groups back to its engineering team. This allowed engineers to hear feedback directly, eliminating skepticism and creating immediate alignment on necessary design changes without requiring them to travel.
At Rainbird, engineers build the first 'production intent' units for field trials themselves, on the actual assembly line. This serves two critical functions: it produces the necessary test units and simultaneously allows the engineering team to validate and debug the manufacturing process before scaling up.
The decision to delay a product to fix a design flaw was easier because the team had recently killed another product that failed due to a weak value proposition. This painful, shared experience created organizational readiness to prioritize getting the product right over hitting an arbitrary deadline.
Rainbird hosts 'fly-in' events, bringing customer groups (like architects or contractors) to its headquarters. These events include an 'innovation lab' where product managers showcase early-stage concepts under NDA. This institutionalizes customer feedback, making it a predictable and recurring part of the development process.
A product manager's casual comment to an engineer about combining parts led to the engineer building a functional prototype overnight using existing components and a 3D printer. This tangible model quickly gained executive attention and became the basis for a formal project, bypassing typical ideation hurdles.
Focus groups in different cities revealed that customers for the same irrigation product had vastly different priorities. Los Angeles cared about aesthetics, Denver about winter durability, and Orlando about price sensitivity. This multi-region research was crucial for designing a product that could succeed nationally.
For its new B2B irrigation product, Rainbird briefs specifiers like landscape architects 3-4 months before launch. This 'rolling thunder' approach ensures the product is already designed into future projects when it becomes available, creating immediate demand and bypassing the typical slow ramp-up period.
For field trials, Rainbird creates 'production intent' parts using 'soft tooling'—cheaper, lower-volume molds made from softer steel. Unlike 3D prints, these parts have the same manufacturing limitations as the final product, providing far more realistic feedback on form, fit, and durability before investing in expensive production molds.