22 Quotes from Hosain Rahman on How to Design Hardware Products
From How to Start a Startup — Lecture 17
From Stanford’s CS183B Course How to Start a Startup — Lecture 17
The quotes below are all 140 characters or less, so please feel free to share as you see fit. In case I’ve missed any quotes or you find any errors, please leave me a comment and I will be sure to update the post.
- “The thinking needs to shift from being less about the actual things, to being about the individual user.”
- 1/“Everything for us is a system. We don’t think about it discretely as just as a piece of hardware, or discretely as an application…”
- 2/”or discretely as a platform. We think about it across the whole thing.”
- “In the hardware world, you’ve got to take your time because your iteration cycles are much more deliberate.”
- On the exploration stage — “It is a little bit science project-y sometimes, and we talk about it that way.”
- On the early validation stage — “You have to take those concepts and prove them, a little bit like you do a PhD thesis.”
- “Think about where does this stand in the experience continuum that you’ve been imagining, where the world’s going to go.”
- “What is the user problem that once we solve users can’t live without?”
- “We start to try to live in tomorrow and the future, and start to think about what we build today as a stepping stone to graduate users.”
- “It has to go to the level of emotional connection, where you feel without it you’re lost.”
- 1/“You sort of have to separate what are questions you can ask that are going to help make you smarter about your thesis versus…”
- 2/“trying to get somebody to validate it for you.”
- “No one is going to tell you what to build. If they did, then they should do it, not you.”
- “You have to have the definition of what you’re trying to do across the system.”
- “I think that ‘system think’ is a mindset.”
- “You gotta think about your category, your replacement cycle, usage, how these things come together and the dynamics are different.”
- “We can dream a lot faster than what’s possible.”
- 1/“I have a daily call thats 2.5 hrs with the entire team: from materials, sourcing, manufacturing, design, sensor, firmware…”
- 2/“mechanical engineering — all together and they all have to sit through each other’s updates…”
- 3/”but then understand what those tradeoffs are and I sort of force that communication.”
- 1/”It turned out that building mobile software was a lot more like building hardware…”
- 2/”where you had 1 shot and you had to get it right, right out of the gate.”
Please note that the quotes do not go into the detailed design process that Jawbone uses internally within the company to create their products. You can learn about the design process by watching the entire lecture for yourself here: http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec17/
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Image Credit: Screenshot taken from Stanford CS183B Lecture 17 Video
