In the hardware world, you've got to take your time because your iteration cycles are much more deliberate.
We can dream a lot faster than what's possible.
We start to try to live in tomorrow and the future, and start to think about what we build today as a stepping stone to graduate users.
You sort of have to separate what are questions you can ask that are going to help make you smarter about your thesis versus. . . trying to get somebody to validate it for you.
What is the user problem that once we solve users can't live without?
It is a little bit science project-y sometimes, and we talk about it that way.
You have to take those concepts and prove them, a little bit like you do a PhD thesis.
The thinking needs to shift from being less about the actual things, to being about the individual user.
It turned out that building mobile software was a lot more like building hardware. . . where you had 1 shot and you had to get it right, right out of the gate.
Think about where does this stand in the experience continuum that you've been imagining, where the world's going to go.
You have to have the definition of what you're trying to do across the system.
You gotta think about your category, your replacement cycle, usage, how these things come together and the dynamics are different.
I have a daily call thats 2. 5 hrs with the entire team: from materials, sourcing, manufacturing, design, sensor, firmware. . . mechanical engineering - all together and they all have to sit through each other's updates. . . but then understand what those tradeoffs are and I sort of force that communication.
It has to go to the level of emotional connection, where you feel without it you're lost.
Everything for us is a system. We don't think about it discretely as just as a piece of hardware, or discretely as an application. . . or discretely as a platform. We think about it across the whole thing.
I think that 'system think' is a mindset.
No one is going to tell you what to build. If they did, then they should do it, not you.