Product design.

IN 2008, ROBERT J. WANG was forced out of the mobile messaging software company he had co-founded. In need of a new venture, he looked homeward for inspiration. “We had two young kids,” says Wang. “Fixing a dinner—an actually healthy dinner—was challenging. We’d do a lot of takeout.” He began imagining an appliance smart enough to prepare almost any meal he wanted to cook.

Two years later, Wang debuted the Instant Pot pressure cooker, putting a high-tech spin on the retro “set it and forget it” utility of the 1970s Crock-Pot. Wang’s tricked-out device, which uses a microprocessor along with thermal- and pressuresensor technology, autonomously functions as, among other things, a slow cooker, a rice cooker, a yogurt maker, a sauté pan, a steamer, and a food warmer. “It was obvious we could control cooking in a much more intelligent way,” says Wang, an ex-Nortel engineer.

Obvious, but not easy. Wang recruited a couple of telecom engineers and invested more than $300,000 of his savings to solve the highly technical challenge. His team spent 18 months toiling over the first-generation model, eventually landing on a burn-protection mechanism that could maintain the cooking sweet spot at the bottom of the pot, between 266 and 284 degrees Fahrenheit.

Double Insight, Wang’s Ottawa-based company, became profitable in 2012 and has increased revenue twofold every year since. Last year, its device earned a cult following after Amazon ran a promotion, resulting in 215,000-plus sales in one day, along with rabid word-of-mouth buzz. Today, enthusiasts trade recipe hacks and videos in a 450,000-member Instant Pot Facebook group.

Even with the appliance ranking among Amazon’s top-selling kitchen products in the U.S., Wang claims to still read every Amazon review. He says they provide clues for designing new features, like the fourth-generation model’s Bluetooth connectivity, which adjusts cooking time according to a user’s altitude. And like any good engineer, he has several go-to stress tests for product tweaks. “Unsoaked beans,” Wang says. “They’re much harder to cook than meat.”