One of the more popular cliches of the startup world is the immortal Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things.” Even though Facebook has since changed its motto, speed is currency in Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs constantly promote their agility with phrases like “I built this in a weekend” or “we push five releases per day.” Investors brag about portfolio companies that are “crushing it” with “crazy fast iterations.” The Techstars mantra encourages companies to Do More Faster.

But is this really the right focal point for all companies?

One of my favorite comics from Randal Monroe’s XKCD.….with a little modification (https://xkcd.com/1428/)

Speed is one of the primary enablers of the startup ecosystem. It allows small, cash-strapped startups to overtake much larger, well financed behemoths. Shortening the build-measure-learn loop is crucial to startup survival and “ask for forgiveness product development” works really well when the friction of making changes is minimal.

Speed is great for software companies but will cripple hardware companies if not managed with caution.

The ‘Long Shadow’ of hardware

Friction in the hardware development process is fundamental to the nature of building things out of atoms. Most first-time hardware developers point to manufacturing as the major pain-point. This is a novice’s misinterpretation. It only seems that way because manufacturing is where the rubber meets the road from the past 6–12 months of product development. Early mistakes often don’t have a measurable impact until first shots are coming off tooling and the manufacturing process grinds to a halt.

My partner Scott calls this the “long shadow effect.” An early decision about which microcontroller to use or the shape of a housing can appear correct until months or even years later during the first production run. Sometimes parts can have exceptionally long lead times, require odd financing terms, demand manual rework, or be entirely un-moldable. None of these problems can be uncovered by moving quickly to get to production.

Shining light on the Long Shadow

There’s really only one way to avoid the debilitating effects of the long shadow of hardware: process. Strong process control is the difference between success and failure when it comes to scaling a hardware business.

Every engineer/manager/company has their own process that works best for them. At the risk of preaching a one-size-fits-all methodology, this is a high-level view of the a process of physical product development that has worked well for me: