Caitlin Kalinowski: recommendation

Transcript context

…Having your goals defined early and sticking to them is important. Hardware's not as adaptable to lots of changes throughout its development as anything digital. And so if you set out to say, "Okay, we want to make something that's $300," and then halfway through you say, "Oh, it actually has to be $150," you've almost burned a lot of that early time. So you kind of need to have a sense of having pre-thought out what you want, and having those, I like to call them KPIs, but essentially goals written down, and try to change them as little as possible. So that is very tough. In fact, that may be the toughest thing. Because if you do that properly, and you have the right prioritization of those things, you know whether you can ship or not. You know whether you're done. And in hardware, one of the challenges is, we talked about compiling four or five times. Every time you build and you iterate your design, that's another three months or four months or five months or whatever it might be. And so you're trying to time the feature set, with the quality, with the timing. And in hardware, timing is important, because if you come out with your product a few weeks before your competitor, you might get all the PR, you might get all the interest. It's pretty brutal. And so each of those days that you ship before your competitor is worth a lot of money. It might be worth $10 million to you. I'm making this up. I don't know. So you have to balance that with how many times you iterate. And if you know what your goals are upfront and you hit them, then you know you can ship. And often engineers, and I'm guilty of this too, especially on the hardware side, never feel like they're done. So this is a pretty nuanced thing. So that's one thing. The second thing is we tend to design the things that we know how to design first, and actually the right approach is to design the hardest parts first. One example will be, and there's no IP here, so I'm obviously not going to share any IP or anything internal, but at one point we had to route cables through a hinge in a device, in a laptop we were making. And because it wasn't clear that those cables would fit, that's where the architect started. And he looked at the diameter, and how to split the cables out, and made sure that they would fit before finalizing the hinge design. A lot of people would start at the part they knew, like, "Oh, we're going to use this display, so I'm going to put this in CAD, and I'm going to do all this other stuff." But the architects who are the best actually look at where are the pinch points, where is this going to fail? And they start to do the detailed design there first. And then a couple other points is, the part that your customer touches or interacts with the most needs way more iteration than everything else. So easy on a computer, you touch the trackpad the most, and then maybe the keyboard next. So those things have to be really good. interacts with the most needs way more iteration than everything else. So easy on a computer, you touch the trackpad the most, and then maybe the keyboard next. So those things have to be really good. They have to feel good, they have to respond properly, they have to be highly reliable, and then maybe the other pieces further out don't take quite as much iteration. So you have to boost your iteration on the things that people touch the most or interact with the most. So those are kind of some principles that I wrote about, but these are just things that you learn trying to build quickly. And the last piece that's really critical if you're making hardware for folks out there who are trying to make hardware is, you can't wait around, ever. There's never enough time. So if you know that you need to do something, what I learned from folks like Shelly Goldberg at Apple now, who I think is a VP now, and Kate Bergeron when I was there at Apple is, you need to do it right now. Anything you know you need to do, you need to do right now, because in two days there's going to be a surprise coming around the corner that you need that time to fix. And so this sense of stacking the things that you know you need to do and just getting them out of the way, even if you technically have more time, is this kind of ruthless efficiency that I learned with them. Amazing. Okay. Let me just summarize your advice here. So one is be very clear on goals, I want to come back to this. Two is do the hardest part first, the riskiest piece, essentially, to physically build. Three is focus on the pieces that people will use most, say the trackpad, keyboard. I want to talk about that. And four is just like, do it now. Even if you think you have more time, you never know what's around the corner, and it's better-…

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