Building products to teach kids to love science and embrace failure

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TLDR

I’m interviewing Rachele Harmuth, Chief Product Officer at CrunchLabs, to discuss scaling a beloved STEM brand from viral YouTube content to hands-on products, classroom curriculum, and partnerships with platforms like Netflix. Rachele Harmuth shares her journey from toy design to product leadership and how CrunchLabs manages collaboration between content and product teams. She shares lessons learned on operationalizing brand values during high-growth expansion and the importance of building resilient creators who embrace failure. This episode is packed with actionable insights for product managers aiming to balance innovation with brand consistency.

Introduction

Mark Rober has 73 million YouTube subscribers watching him build glitter bombs and squirrel obstacle courses. But how do you turn that content into products that actually ship to millions of customers—and then scale that into retail stores worldwide?

That’s the challenge facing today’s guest. She’s leading product strategy at CrunchLabs as they expand from STEM subscription boxes into global retail, classroom curriculum, and a Netflix series—all launching in 2026. In this discussion, you’ll learn how to decide how content interacts with product strategy, how to maintain desired outcomes at scale, and how to operationalize brand values across a product team. 

Our guest is Rachele Harmuth, Chief Product Officer at CrunchLabs. She’s spent 30 years in the toy industry at companies including Scholastic, Ravensburger, and Fat Brain Toys. She also founded MESH Helps, a nonprofit building children’s resilience through play. Furthermore, she won the Women in Toys 2025 Wonder Women Award. 

Summary of Concepts Discussed for Product Managers

Rachele’s Journey to CrunchLabs:
While at Ravensburger, Rachele Harmuth discovered CrunchLabs while seeking inspiring engineering toys for her own kids. Her son, a senior in high school, told her that Mark Rober is the reason he wanted to be an engineer. Initially Rachele pursued a partnership between Ravensburger and CrunchLabs, but her passion for their products and ideas for improvement led CrunchLabs’ president to invite her onboard.

CrunchLabs’ Product Strategy:
CrunchLabs’ unique strategy involves a unique collaboration between content creators (including Mark Rober) and toy engineers. Both teams cross-pollinate ideas. Their shared mission is showing kids that science is fun and approachable.

Cross-Functional Product Development:
To maintain brand focus amid rapid growth (retail, curriculum, media), CrunchLabs focuses on three goals: Spark Curiosity, Embrace Failure, and Build Creative Confidence. Everyone from every area of the company was part of the discussion to put together these three goals. These vision statements provide direction, since very product, feature, and piece of content is judged by whether it supports those goals. A core part of CrunchLabs’ mission is to help kids embrace failure. Mark’s videos show him embracing failures, problem solving and operating by CrunchLab’s three vision statements. Rachele is translating those statements into physical products so that customers can develop these problem-solving and engineering skills too.

Testing Product Designs:
CrunchLabs tests every product with kids in the target age range, fine-tuning challenge levels and instructions to ensure engaging, confidence-boosting experiences that mimic the iterative process celebrated in their videos. Direct feedback from diverse test groups drives meaningful improvements.

Saying No to Stay Focused:
As CrunchLabs’ brand is expanding, they maintain brand focus by being very selective and saying no to more things than they say yes to. They evaluate each opportunity for impact and additive value and choose opportunities that align with all three of their goal statements and help them reach the most brains.

Useful Links

• Learn more about CrunchLabs
• Connect with Rachele on LinkedIn
• Check out Mark Rober and CrunchLabs on YouTube
• Check out Mark Rober’s CrunchLabs on Netflix

Innovation Quotes

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt

“A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” – J. A. Shedd.

Application Questions

1. How can your product team effectively translate your brand values into concrete operational frameworks as you scale?
2. In what ways could cross-functional teams inform and inspire each other in your organization?
3. What processes ensure you get authentic customer feedback, and how do you handle unexpected findings?
4. How does your company evaluate which new opportunities to pursue, and which to decline, to protect focus and brand integrity?
5. What methods do you use to cultivate a culture of creative confidence and constructive failure within your product teams?

Bio

Rachele Harmuth is chief product officer at CrunchLabs, where she leads product strategy and innovation as the company expands beyond its successful subscription business into new toy and education verticals. With more than 30 years of toy industry leadership across Scholastic, Ravensburger, Fat Brain Toys, and K’NEX, Harmuth is a fearless change-maker harnessing the power of play to drive meaningful innovation and address the youth mental health crisis. She founded MESH Helps, a nonprofit dedicated to building resilience in kids through play, and serves as its board president, having mobilized the industry with research-driven solutions including the groundbreaking MESH Accreditation Program that evaluates toys for their ability to develop resilience-building skills. Harmuth’s dedication to innovation and educational play aligns with CrunchLabs’ unique position at the intersection of education and entertainment, where she is creating STEM experiences that inspire kids to see themselves as builders, problem-solvers, and future innovators.

Thanks!

Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.

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