Sunday Rewind: Video: Hardware vs software product management

This week’s Sunday Rewind is a 2015 ProductTank San Francisco talk in which Kristoffer Lawson talked about how creating hardware has become easier than ever before with platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, and a wealth of manufacturing opportunities in Asia.

At the time, Kristoffer was running Solu Machines, which built a pocket-sized cloud-based computer, and which filed for bankruptcy in 2017. He runs some of the lessons he learned and answers questions from the floor.

Lean processes don’t apply in the same way, he said. Hardware mistakes are expensive, and lead times and prototypes for complex products are relatively high. You have to pick your markets carefully and really work out where the interest lies before you start. “It’s basically a waterfall model,” he said. “It’s quite a challenge as a startup.

You have to design everything so ahead of time and changing things along the way is incredibly costly.”

Watch the original talk: Video: Hardware vs software product management