If you’ve ever worked in a hardware startup, you’ve probably seen this pattern:
- Engineering begins to execute a robust multi-phased development and validation plan.
- Before the development cycle is completed, the business needs to put products in paying customers’ hands to attract new investment.
- These early units are prone to failure due to incomplete validation
- Engineering is forced to pivot to field support to keep customers (and investors) happy
- Progress on formal validation slows to a crawl
- We spend the rest of our days playing whack a mole with issues on poorly documented prototypes
Isn’t there a better way??
Maybe we should stop planning for perfection (a complete, robust validation cycle),
Engineering could collaborate with finance and marketing to create a development timeline that includes early customer deliveries.
Based on this timeline, we could prioritize critical testing before shipping anything.
We could preemptively create a service team whose sole focus is supporting our immature product in the field, allowing the development team to remain focused.
We could document our prototype designs as if they are in production (because they are!), ensuring our service team knows what they’re working on.
We could design our early prototypes with service in mind, designing in modularity, access to critical components, etc.
We would make sure we’re capturing as much data as possible from our early sales units - this is some of the best testing possible!
If you plan for failure, you just might succeed!
-Brian Schoolcraft
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