Lucy Driscoll is a hardware technology leader who has built & designed patented consumer products for your home and is now hard at work developing a new beauty device to save busy professionals some time too. She is a Principal Mechanical Engineer at 10Beauty, building an innovative manicure machine set to be released in 2024.
Lucy grew up locally on the South Shore with her 3 brothers. Her dad was a trauma surgeon and her mom was a special education teacher before transitioning to take care of an extremely busy home and family life. Lucy’s mom later went back to assistant teaching in classrooms and tutored students in the neighborhood too when the kids could drive themselves around. Her dad recognized that Lucy had a scientific mind early on and he would take her to shadow him at the local hospital. But she had slightly different aspirations.
Attending Notre Dame Academy in Hingham for high school, she studied science under Mark Pumphrey. Mr. Pumphrey inspired her to take up engineering by cutting a deal. He would help sponsor an AP Physics class to help Lucy with her college requirements if she would help him start a robotics team. They shook on it. Mr. Pumphrey led with contagious excitement & encouragement and the learning came easily. A great early lesson. If you love what you do, the rest will likely soon follow.
A lot of the Driscolls had attended Notre Dame including her dad, one of 10 children. Her grandfather had studied at Notre Dame too, as an electrical engineer, so there was some serious precedent on this path. When Lucy was admitted, she was thrilled and off she went to South Bend. Unsurprisingly, she even had some cousins from her large family tree studying on campus during her time there as well.
Lucy entered into Notre Dame’s Mechanical Engineering program. After attaining her undergrad degree, where she mastered a lot of the basics and theory, she stayed to get her Masters. Her graduate classes were focused on real world entrepreneurial topics like how to drive startup innovation within large organizations. A number of her classmates started their own companies and it gave her incredibly valuable foundational skills as well as confidence to pursue engineering for the long term.
She initially thought she would stay close to the medical field like her dad via medical devices but, after graduating, Lucy began interning at Boston area iRobot and caught the consumer bug. Dr. Driscoll still tells her it’s not too late to go to med school though..
Lucy really clicked with the iRobot team and, while she looked for full time roles, an opening came up on one of their product development teams. One of her colleagues and mentors Marcus Williams, helped her get hired full time.
Lucy loved developing new consumer products. She helped research a wet mop device that later became iRobot’s Braava Jet. Lucy would go out and buy all the leading wet floor care products to see how they rotated, shook, and self cleaned in order to pare down the mechanics. She would examine the mechanisms and materials for inspiration. How much force could you apply from the various designs? She learned how to build a consistent research process, stripping things down to better understand how to design a product of her own.
She was on a team that helped launch two iRobot wet floor care products – the Braava Jet & the Braava M6 – during her time there. She also got to spend a lot of time abroad in iRobot’s China factories, traveling to do quality control and help bridge coordination. As the junior most employee on the team, she was available and took full advantage of the travel and learnings. Coordination with the factory process is a pretty useful skill set she still leverages today.
Lucy grew a ton at iRobot, eventually leading R&D for their wet floor care development team. She became a professional engineer and also helped chair the women’s group at the company. She even patented her first invention, a charging dock for mopping robots that had a removable tray so the mop could be cleaned. Surely you’re familiar with patent search from patents of your own? If not, you can see a breakdown of Lucy’s patents here. Lucy was even featured as a Notre Dame “Domer Dozen” honoring alumni doing notable, interesting work early in their careers.
She first heard about Boston based 10Beauty through a mentor, Marcus Williams, the one who hired her at iRobot. They were building a first of its kind manicure machine to help disrupt the multi-billion dollar beauty industry and automate a very manual and time consuming process for busy professional women. Lucy did her due diligence and fell in love with the whole team, especially their technical and cultural approach to building 10Beauty. The co-founders, Alex Shashou & Justin Effron, had a lot of startup experience as second time founders and combined with CTO Chris Casey’s engineering leadership she had faith in their ability to build out the right team and execute on their roadmap.
The 10Beauty team is bringing technology and a new type of hardware to the beauty industry. Robots can paint your nails today but 10Beauty is building a machine to give you a 5 step manicure in under 40 minutes. Launching B2B next year, they are fully sold out on pre-orders to hair salons, luxury gyms, hotels, and department stores.
Lucy has full ownership of the “removal” subsystem part of the product. She’s also helping to design a dust management system that vacuums all of the debris from the manicure. Sound familiar? She and her team are doing everything they can to make sure that part of the machine is delivered on time. Her other responsibilities include working closely with the Vision team, helping to determine what mechanical requirements must be satisfied from a camera, calibration, and mounting perspective to make it all work well. She loves working on the user experience aspects of hardware, like how the hand rest will work to make sure everyone’s fingers are comfortable when the machine is working its magic.
Building hardware is expensive, with long lead times and development cycles. In robotics you need everything to come together and, as Lucy describes, “the integration part is no joke”. But she loves working cross functionally and is proud of the removal system she has designed. 10Beauty’s machine patent and the work that’s gone into it is something she’s really proud of. And there’s nothing like a product launch so she can’t wait for 10Beauty’s big 2024 rollout. There’s much more skin in the game this time around!
In her spare time, Lucy enjoys mentoring young women in STEM education. No surprise that today she helps coach the Notre Dame Academy robotics part time from her home in Cambridge. There’s nothing like reverse engineering products with ambitious kids.
Learning to Fail as a Design Experiment
Life is about experimentation, right? In engineering, failure is a really good thing. The faster you can beat back that intense feeling of failure, the feeling of needing to know how to do something or want to do it perfectly, is the point at which you start to make progress. Because when you’re failing, you’re learning.
Lucy loves teaching this to other women in engineering. At robotics practice, she gets the opportunity to mentor and reframe failure for up & coming female engineering leaders. Because failure is an essential part of the design process.
So how do you even start designing something? First, you break off little pieces at a time and iterate on them. Then you go out and do your research.
For physical products, it’s helpful to go out and collect a bunch of existing products. You can break them down into different variables that are relevant for your own use cases to see what will affect various outcomes. You’ll pick which sub-sections might apply within your product requirements and then isolate them for testing.
This is where the learning & failure cycle comes in. You build something, slap it together, and see how it works. At iRobot when they developed their first wet pad product they would start by taking a Roomba and mounting a wet pad underneath to get something going quickly. Just start small! They used an existing platform to try something. Usually it will fail (that prototype did) and that begins the development process of testing and ironing out the details.
Lucy makes sure to add “you won’t fail any less as you add more complexity and detail”. But by beginning with a simplicity mindset, as you work through your research process, you can add complexity as you begin to understand the various components. After enough iterations you will build confidence in a really solid, foundational design.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Support Creates Value – “The value of working with a team that you trust and are aligned with from a values perspective is so huge in this line of work. It’s not easy to get people who are passionate, devoted, and trustworthy, valuing what each person has to offer together. Fitting the right work to the right person and fitting management techniques to people, with everyone equally committed by making people feel valued, that support snowballs”
Knowing Your Value – “Resist comparing yourself to a colleague or dwelling on your weaknesses. Where I really started having success was when I got comfortable with where my value was (or wasn’t) so I didn’t feel as ashamed of where I had weak spots. Being on a team that builds you up and sees your value is important too”
Find Mentors – “If you’re constantly in a room with people who don’t look like you, it’s great to have a mentor who does look like you or has encountered similar obstacles, to help navigate the challenges of being younger and perhaps being a non-traditional member of your function to better navigate challenges and help chart a course for you.”
Lucy is really excited for 10Beauty’s upcoming roadmap on their path to launch. Her passion and excitement will always lie in new product development. She is also passionate about carving out spaces for people who don’t feel as represented in engineering right now. She would love to see more diversity in the workplace and systems that make startups more conducive to moms because, in engineering, you build products for everyone. Eventually, Lucy would like to start a business focusing on supporting young women in underserved communities through STEAM education.
If you want to learn more about Lucy you can find her dreaming up hardware innovations around Cambridge, spending time with the Notre Dame Academy robotics team, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing Lucy. We’re all excited to experience our first robotic manicure in the months ahead!!