Shipping Hardware at the Speed of Software

The traditional approach to hardware development involves designing and coordinating with manufacturers on the other side of the globe. For electronics, this is a process that often takes well over a year for each product and comes with massive risk for any sized company.

At Codeshelf, our warehouse tech startup, we built a process that dramatically reduced that risk. By building an entirely new process for designing, testing and manufacturing products in-house, we were able to bring timelines down from quarters to weeks. This allowed us to be very adaptive to the market and reduce the spend on our highly trained team of engineers. We also avoided the need for major capital expenditure to meet minimum order quantities and eliminate concerns around damaged or lost shipments. In this way, we reduced the cost of new product development by or 80% and new product versions by over 60%.

I co-developed this process with our CTO and led the redesign of our hardware line, transforming a set of hacked-together, off-the-shelf electrical boxes into a unified family of products. By aligning design, engineering, and operations, we created physical products that could ship on a two-week cycle, keeping in lockstep with our software sprints.