Overland Sauna - Lean Product Development

Objective

I like a good sauna. This probably has to do with growing up in the Finnish American Community in Minnesota and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Beyond bathing and relaxing, sauna gave me a ritual to connect with my family history, my relatives, and my space in the natural world. Jump forward ten years and I’m living in a new city without access to a public sauna that is consistent with the ritual I desired. As a millennial, we don’t own a house yet so building a traditional sauna is impossible. I decided to apply the method I’ve learned developing disruptive products to make an artifact that delivers the sauna ritual I desire.

Team & Process

Using the methods I’ve learned developing disruptive products for connected health products I enlisted my family to build iterations on a sauna that fits our needs.

• First I defined what is the social, emotional and physical job a sauna does. Then, what would that the ideal experience be.

• Second I built a minimum viable product to deliver the experience within my constraints.

• Third I measured and iterated on the experience based on what we learned.

Result

The result was journey that not only met my requirements going in, but produced unexpected delights and opportunities as the project grew. Most significantly being able to offer the gift of a traditional sauna to other members of my family who, like me, are living in a place where that is not often an option. Finding a community of people of fast adopting sauna enthusiasts. Beyond all of that, building an iterative prototype has shown me things about the experience I would not have known if I had just built the “ideal” solution the first time.

What is a Sauna and what does it do?

What is a Sauna

Finnish Sauna culture was recently  inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO. Describing a sauna as a sacred space and a church of nature. The Finnish sauna isn’t just a room or a building, it’s a cultural ritual. The building is the artifact that holds that ritual. The sauna experience I grew up with isn’t quite the same as the sauna at the YMCA. It’s about a weekly cleansing, a ritual of relaxation, and a family/community event. There are possibly other health or wellness benefits but I don’t care, for me, that’s not the point.

What a sauna means to me (Reflecting on the Job a Sauna Does)

Sauna is about cleaning the mind and body. When I think about what a sauna means to me, I think about how when I sit in the sauna at the end of a long, cold week I never have the feeling that I wish I was anywhere else. What I know about how to sauna I learned from my parents, my grandparents or my great grandparents. To them, every little piece of the experience was part of enjoying the experience from splitting the wood for the stove “warms you up twice” to what kind of towel was the best for effective drying. It was a celebration of senses, a test of character and where we sat, four generations of our family, in contented silence. To make my own iteration of this sacred relic that brought me profound relaxation and peace, I needed to bring those sensations, that reverence for the process, and an artifact that is as earnest as the ritual it facilitates.

Here is what you do:

1. Enter the hot sauna

2. Sit, breath deeply

3. Throw water on the hot rocks to create Loyly (steam)

4. When you get too hot, go outside to cool down

5. Re-enter and warm up, repeat until tired

6. Wash off the dirt from your pores and head inside

Here are the sensations I feel:

• See - muted, warm lighting, natural materials, wood fire flickering, smooth stones

• Touch - cedar slats, hot air 150 F to 200 F, steam, cold water

• Hear - fire crackle, steam hiss, nothing else

• Taste - clean sweat rolling off my face

• Smell - clean cedar, pine tar soap, steam, a tiny bit of smoke.

• Self/balance - stable, seated or reclined

• Body Temperature - Hot (not surprising), little to no sense of air movement.

What Matters of this experience. (Gains)

Because I am my main user in this scenario, let me tell you what I think is essential to getting this to work.

1. Wood burning stove heat a space above 150 F - ideally 180F +

2. Hot rocks to throw steam

3. Relaxing place to sit

4. calm set and setting

5. Cedar smell

6. No disguise

Limitations (pains)

1. Because we are renting, I can’t just build a permanent structure in the backyard.

2. For the same reason it is difficult to justify spending much more than $500 dollars a year on having a sauna

3. Also with two little kids I don’t have a ton of time to spend fabricating.

Artifact (product) Requirement Brief

A successful product would:

• Be a temporary structure

• Cost less than $1000 to start

• Include sauna artifact essentials - wood stove, rocks, wooden bench

• Embody an authentic aesthetic - natural unfinished wood, iron, stone

Initial success Criteria (Painkillers, Delighters, Features)

• Temporary building / mobile

• Low cost < $1000

• Achieves experience goals

• Authentic Aesthetic - like the beach. As much as I like Chicago beaches, but just because they have sand and water and sun doesn’t make them the same as Kona beaches.

Benchmarking: Do we have to build a sauna?

Great question, here are the options we considered

1. Build traditional sauna (renting)

2. Trailer Sauna (storage, price)

3. Barrel sauna (storage, price)

4. Indoor sauna kit (non-wood stove, renting)

5. Tent sauna (ew, I don’t want to sweat in nylon)

Minimum Viable Artifact

Pare down the experience to only the essentials

• Ideation Session.

• Wireframe.

• Look/tone/feel

Experience Evaluation

Ideal idea vs. ideal experience. Did V1 deliver on the primary goals of the sauna?

Metrics:

• Heat - yes above 170 on the first attempt!

• Rocks to Make steam - yes

• Relaxing place to sit - yes

• Calm set and setting - yes

  Notes:

• Drafty canvas made uneven heat

• Stove gave off more radiant heat than convection heat

• Feet got cold on the ground

• Took some time to set up and take down

  Adaptations:

• Add insulation to outside

• Create radiant heat shields for the stove

• Add foot bench

Backlog + Dev Cycle

Examples: Key experience drivers / in scope

• weekly use + review for cold season

• Heat retention - moving blankets

• Radiant Heat - metal deflectors

• Cold Feet - foot rest

• Water dripping - Weather proofing

• Set and take down plan

• 2.0 - the future

• Mobility

• Product Roadmap

• Easier frame set-up and storage

• More door

• Added insulation for cold weather

• Dark mode

• Interior materials

• Accessories holder

• Define bench by truck bed

• Higher bench + floor

• Horizon indirect lighting

• Custom exhaust stove w/traditional airflow adaptation.

Retrospective:

Strengths - 40+ saunas, dramatic improvement in understanding what I want to build. As time goes on the experience better fits those of us who use it. Considering the activation energy required, it’s become an incredibly impressive weekly habit.

Values: in my life, bringing my family onboard opens up new meaning and support.

The goal was to have the best sauna possible each week. So an okay sauna this week is better than no sauna this week. But did we sacrifice on end state by rushing?

After 2 years of saunas I can say that not only is having any sauna better than not, but that for all my understanding of my desires, my initial idea of what would be perfect was wrong in ways I couldn’t see until we tried it.

Weaknesses - is it really better than the conventional options? Would it have better to buy one and disassemble afterwards?

Opportunities - understand what I really want to build now. Each next generation gets more precise.

Threats - high energy engagement, burnout, lose progress