If you’ve ever been in a hardware startup, you’ve felt this pressure.
Investment has given you a runway, and you’ve got to start generating revenue (or attract more investment) before it runs out. One of the best ways to do this is by selling something.
In a perfect world, we’d work our way through each phase of the development cycle before we field our product. We’d have good confidence that it works, and high expectations for its reliability.
But that basically never happens right? As soon as the prototype works well enough to hand to a customer, it’s extremely hard to resist selling it.
Engineering pushes back, but most of the time the business team wins, and the prototype jumps straight to production. It’s in the hands of the customer now, and it’s everyone’s job to make the best of it.
It’d be easy to just sit back and say this is the wrong way to develop a product, but we have to face that it’s necessary sometimes.
So what’s an engineering team to do? I’ll dive into my thoughts more next week, but I’d love to hear your experience in the meantime!
-Brian Schoolcraft
Comments