Yohana
Relationship — Embedded
Consultant, Interim VP of Design
Gathering requirements and building long-range product development roadmap for hardware.
12-week sprint with CEO, VP Marketing and Product Manager
Deliverable
In May of 2022, my dear friend and collaborator Greg Johnson introduced me to his new boss — Yoky Matsuoka.
Yoky had been the CTO of Google Nest and co-founder of Google X ( coincidentally Astro Teller one of the other co-founders introduced my first start-up Matternet to solve for X ten years earlier).
Yoky had a wonderful vision, she had experienced firsthand the strain of managing family, work, and health as a busy Mom and entrepreneur and had used every conceivable technology hack to make it easier, with little success — with Yohana her new startup, she set out to make life easier for busy moms, and so unlock the wellbeing of the entire family.
We chatted about marketing which Greg led, and I mentioned that I had just finished working on the long-range product roadmap for Tile — and Yoky looked perplexed. Was she speaking to the wrong person? She’d thought I was a marketer? I explained that I had a long career doing both product and marketing and we began talking at length about hardware.
Yoky hired me as a consultant to lead hardware new product development with the brilliant Stacey Burr and I wish I could tell you about the insane and wonderful products we were working on, but I can’t.
But this week, Yoky unveiled Umi, a holistic digital family wellness platform and coach that comes out of the strategic work that Greg, Yoky, Stacey and I formed three years ago — so I wanted to share some of our learning.
Being a consultant is both a blessing and a curse, as I haven’t had to undergo the stresses and strains of building the product, and I’m so, so, proud of the whole team for realizing their vision. But I got to be an outside mind, temporarily on the inside laying groundwork with Greg who’s my favorite person to think with and together we mapped out the next ten years not only for Yohana and Panasonic but also for design that has agentic UX at its core.
Some of the massive realizations:
Although helping the CEO of the household is a great first-order priority, most of the complexity for families lies within organization. Most of the complexity in getting help with organization means designing between services, platforms, partners, and products. We needed to design for mediation at a massive scale.
The next observation is that the family CEOs that struggle the most exist in a ‘Sandwich Generation’ who are both caring for a growing young family as well as aging parents.
The next realization, most interfaces are designed for a single user. Phones, Personal Computers, TV screens, Remotes, and even kitchen appliances all have fixed UI’s that have the amount of complexity for the standard user and won’t adapt for an older generation, or younger without changing settings. We needed to design collective interfaces.
The realization that came next was the biggest unlock: that there are more than enough services able to support the family today, but they’re not able to be found or not finding the families. The market is broken, and coordinating partners—now available through the Panasonic Well Partner Collective—can create a powerful marketplace of partners, services and unique benefits.
The first unlock was arriving at the concept of Collective Wellbeing. Yoky understood the PERMA framework better than anyone, but PERMA is predominantly applied to individuals. In Emiliya Zhivotovskaya’s updated PERMA-V framework, the added V, vitality shows greater efficacy when practiced within a collective. So we knew we needed to reward individuals and families to get the best outcomes.
The final, and most pivotal unlock was connecting all the thinking back to Panasonic, of which Yohana was a subsidiary, and the ideas of the visionary founder Kōnoske Matsushita.
Matsushita-san realized how machines could save the CEO of the family time by taking the effort out of simple but time-consuming jobs like washing, cooking, and cleaning. Both Matsushita San and Yoky had realized that Time was a precious commodity. However, Yoky realized that the lack of time within family decision-making reduced the quality of relationships and lowered the tolerance for risk within any task that could go wrong.
We laid out a plan to build a system around Events, Places, People, and Time and mapped it back to the home and physical products (Panasonic) and digital experiences and services (Yohana).
From this Panasonic Well was born. I can’t wait to experience Umi, the first product from Panasonic Well and the thinking we did together.
Congratulations to Greg, Stacey and the entire team.
Team
Yoky Matsuoka — Founder and C.E.O
Greg Johnson — Business Strategy
Marc Shillum — New Product Development consultant, Brand Strategy.
Stacey Burr — Product Management