Hardware is hard. But it will make you a better Product Manager
Everyone always says “hardware is hard”.
Silicon Valley was founded on hardware companies… but good software is impossible without sound hardware to power it.
When we use our iPhones and iPads today, we don’t even think about it — companies like Apple have simplified the complexities down where the intersection between hardware and software is indiscernible (as it should be).
But emerging technologies (like in IOT and Smart Home) bring these complexities back to the forefront. And who is tasked with thinking about and solving these problems? The Product development teams.
As the Product Manager, you’re at the nexus of these decisions. And because you are touching both the hardware and software, each decision can have cascading effects on your users.
I’ve been working at Brilliant Smart Home (which recently raised a Series B) for the last three and a half years, and I can say I’m all too familiar with how this works.
It’s taught me to think more critically about user experience, explore new ways of conducting user research, and become a better Product Manager.
Think about these scenarios for a minute…
Not having the ability to solve everything with a software release
When you are dealing with a hardware product, you can’t always solve issues with a re-release. What do you do and how do you prepare for such a scenario?
How to test for more than the digital experience
You need to get a clear read on how a user interacts with the product through human senses (touch, sound, sight etc..) for both the physical product and the software layer. Online testing tools are not so helpful. How can you still achieve your testing goals?
Building a product team that can handle both software and hardware
Think about how much needs to happen to ship a software product. Now add the manufacturing, supply chain, industrial design (and more) complexities with a hardware product. How do you build a product team that can handle both software and hardware?
Now you control the constraints for both hardware and software. What choices will you make?
You no longer have the same limits you do if you work on a web or mobile app. You are the team that creates the constraints and capabilities that are afforded to your user experience. You may not have all the free packages that allow development to move faster, but at the same time, you have way less limits.
What’s a couple ways to address these scenarios?
Not having the ability to solve everything with a software release
- Make Product Quality is front and center for all of your development teams — Product Management, Product Design, Engineering, and QA. It’s not solely QA’s responsibility.
- Product (PM and Design) can contribute to preserving quality by doing Product and Design reviews during the development cycle, even before QA sees the feature. This is a critical part of the product development process at Brilliant.
- Embed your product in your daily life. In my 800 sq ft 1-bed apartment, I have 4 Brilliant Controls, 5 Brilliant Dimmer Switches, and a Brilliant Smart Plug. Not to mention about 30 more integrated devices with Brilliant. This means that every waking moment of my life, I live the Brilliant home. If there’s a regression, I see it first.
- Test the hell out of your product experiences, and do as many in-person user research sessions as you can. I’ll talk more about that in the testing section below.
- And last, if you do release something that you can’t take back — be prepared to get on the phone with that customer and see where you failed. It’s often a bigger deal when it’s a physical product, but reacting fast and preventing it from expanding to more customers is critical. I promise you’ll change some part of your development process to catch it sooner.
How to test for more than the digital experience
- Forget the days that you can just go to usertesting.com or a virtual environment to get most of your regular feedback.
- Managing a product with a physical presence underscores the importance of the product team having a deep understanding of the user journey.
- That requires a constant balance of existing user feedback as well as fresh feedback from new users as they go about their daily lives.
- It’s important for the product team to visually see candid interactions with the product. At Brilliant, that’s means a lot of in-person studies for user journey steps like installation (including wiring). We’ve created physical testing setups in the office for this. At the beginning, we used to carry these to coffee shops and other locations to get quick feedback on our experiences.
- Get regular feedback from existing users tied to your releases. Brilliant releases every 2 weeks on our Control software, and with it we send out release notes to existing users. Users actually respond to these e-mails with positive or negative feedback, and it’s immensely helpful.
Building a product team that can handle both software and hardware
- Based on the strengths across the development teams at the company, identify where Product will add the most value.
- In regards to Hardware decisions, focus on your strengths, and keep some level of specialization between the teams. It may be (like it is at Brilliant), that it is more beneficial for Product to be less focused on the technical aspects, and instead offer value through user experience and research. That hasn’t stopped our product team from becoming resident electricians, however :)
- Software Product Management and Design is more classically defined at this stage. However, the challenge becomes how to project and program manage product launches and go-to-markets. There are more than software releases at play. There are considerations with operational (factory, supply chain) timelines, there are sales channel needs, and the intersection of hardware release stages with software ones. When dealing with a physical product’s release, there is value in bringing a more thorough project management process and thorough product definition is required earlier. It won’t be your typical agile software process — and that’s OK. You’ll adapt to all of these considerations to launch the product. Embrace it, because your users will appreciate that you did.
Now you control the constraints for both hardware and software. What choices will you make?
- If you’ve always worked on Web or Mobile, you’re used to hearing from your engineering team what is easy to build vs not based on the packages available in the software development framework they are working in. You’re also told what you can’t do based on limitations or decisions by Apple and Google for an app to be available in their store.
- When you are building hardware with its own OS, a lot of those limitations go away. You may be using a software development framework that is not necessarily built for your use case, and you have to adapt it. Every time you adapt something, it comes at a cost — you are taking away from another potential feature. That was a big challenge for me at the beginning — what is acceptable for the user experience, and how can I work with the engineering team to really understand where we should invest from a technical side to build the UX for the future.
What you can take away from this
Brilliant was my first experience working on a physical product, and I can say it’s fully cemented my skills as a generalist Product Leader.
If you’re like me and believe that you can apply your skills to any product — you don’t really know until you’ve worked on a physical product.
Dealing with multiple interaction mediums will force you to exercise your versatility as a Product Manager. It’s good to train this muscle, as it keeps you agile and effective in most situations.
When working on a physical product, you will learn both the pain of how a bad decision may impact a customer multiple levels down, as well as how a good foundational decision can save you indefinitely.
Seeing the intersection of hardware and software allows you as a Product Manager to connect the dots between the full user journey.
There is a physicality to everything your user does with any product, and you realize that you have the ability to change their journey through many mediums.
