I've built consumer hardware. I've bought even more of it. Some I've used faithfully for years and other missteps ended up free on Craigslist. I've gotten to work with some brilliant teammates to plan, prototype, test, ship, grow and scale. Somewhere in all of that is a playbook worth writing down...
It started as a personal interest with my first Mac at home, gained momentum with my first iPhone, and then became an obsession, so much so that I spent the summer before college working in the Apple Store on Walnut Street in Philadelphia. It's been the focus of most of my career as well, both at Google working on products like Chromecast and Google Home, and at Mill, building the world's best food recycler and learning from incredible hardware leaders.
Consumer hardware to me is the perfect pressure cooker for product work:
- Consumers are so incredibly fickle with how they spend their money and their attention
- Their preferences, usage patterns, needs, wants are all so different. They create the edgiest of edge cases
- Every step of the development journey is expensive. You have to be so disciplined about how you allocate capital
- So few decisions are easily reversed, especially later in the development cycle
- It's a massive team effort across so many disciplines
- What you build is in someone's day to day life and an object they can physically hold and interact with. Have their friends and kids interact with. What an amazing privilege.
Saving the best part about consumer hardware for last... I'm also the consumer of what I've built. I love my Chromecast, my Google Home, my Mill. And I love (and hate) a bunch of other consumer hardware.
As I think about what's next in my career, I want to create a repository of the lessons I've learned from the stuff I've built, my reflections on the products that others have built, and my playbook for how to make more great consumer hardware. But I'm also going to layer in my own N of 1 thoughts about these products.
So it's Product Review meets Product Management Reflection for consumer hardware.
I thought I'd call it the BOMb. (Sidebar: BOM is Bill of Materials or the structured list of every part in the hardware product and what it costs.) Each post will end with a binary grade, either it's "the BOMb!" (awesome) or "BOMbed..." (not awesome), and a summary of the lessons that I'm bringing with me to whatever's next.