Comment by apical_dendrite
5 hours ago
I worked for a lean startup that built a very expensive hardware product. The company kept the team as small as possible and took a ship fast and iterate approach. They shipped hardware that had numerous design and manufacturing defects and failure rates were very high, over 50% required replacement after 2.5 years. For a while the company was relatively generous with out-of-warranty replacements, which helped mitigate the issue, but that became too expensive. So customers spent thousands of dollars on a hardware product that was likely to fail in the year after the warranty expired. The company was also very reluctant to spend on customer service and QA, but spent very generously on marketing.
I'm curious how you would think about this situation from the lean startup perspective. With hardware products, if you don't do lots of initial testing, the scale of problems might not become apparent for years. You can't just fix a problem with a software patch.
I tried to address this in The Lean Startup and also in the follow-up book The Startup Way. Cutting corners, making crap does not help you test your thesis. What's needed is not to ape the techniques and tactics that work in another industry like software, but to really think from first principles about what will create sustained iteration speed even in a hardware context. In The Startup Way, in particular, I give a bunch of examples, including a bunch from old school manufacturing contexts that have applied these techniques successfully.