Babies
Heating milk on the go — and taking a mental load off of breastfeeding moms.
Ember had already made their name in temperature control, with coffee mugs on sale in Starbucks locations across the country. Their next move? Applying that same heating technology to a baby bottle. Before defining product requirements and sketching concepts, we needed to know what life with bottles really looked like. So we went to the experts — moms with newborns.
I recruited hundreds with Facebook ads (with new babies in their lives, they wouldn’t be signing up for market studies). We held 10 in-home interviews, where moms showed us how they managed bottles every day — filling, storing, carrying, feeding, cleaning. We also showed them renders of what the Ember bottle architecture could look like, to probe for reactions on what felt important.
Our biggest learning? Moms weren’t interested. A fancy bottle warmer felt entirely unnecessary. In the big picture of pumping and feeding, warming was the easy bit. But we paid attention to everything they were doing, not just what they said. We saw moms constantly managing temperature — but their focus was on ensuring the milk stays cool. Getting out of the house took a lot of planning ahead, ice packs, and cooler bags.
If we managed temperature at every step, we would have an entirely different product. It wouldn’t just be a warmer. It would be a new kind of bottle entirely…
Freedom for moms to get out of the house, buying them more sleep, easing trade-offs between multiple caretakers, and giving parents peace of mind at a time when they’re terrified of messing things up.
my role
Qualitative research + analysis
Recruiting + protocol + interviewing
Feature definition + tech requirements
Support for industrial design
Quantitative survey + analysis
Product validation interviews
After an extensive research presentation (105 pages for engineers who wanted to know every detail) I was involved in every meeting for 6 months of industrial design and engineering. We designed a way to keep a bottle cold without ice packs, with a thermal dome to insulate the device. We heard parents’ wariness about Bluetooth, and separated the radio from the bottle itself. Engineers ensured it could warm breast milk safely and conduct heat correctly with that viscosity. We made it a single-button object, keeping out feature creep.
At the end of the process, I ran a quantitative survey to validate our assumptions. Data backed up the same insights, giving us confidence to lock in decisions like bottle size. I met back up with the 10 moms we’d originally talked with, to see their reactions to the final product. And oh, how their answers were different!
This isn’t an unnecessary warmer anymore. It has the potential to do something truly good, and ease so much of the mental load of parenting. Our product promise grew bigger, all because we learned to empathize with parents’ entire journey with bottles. Will it change the world? Let’s just say I’m eagerly awaiting launch.
