"Most winning plays start way deep in your zone. Those are the spectacular ones that change the course of the game."
My friend Martin — who's been VP or SVP of Operations at various companies — left that comment on one of last week's posts - it stuck with me.
He's right. And it applies directly to hardware startups.
Engineering usually thinks they're in the red zone when Manufacturing starts producing a new product. In reality, they're at midfield. There are still dozens of problems and loose ends to sort out before that product ships in volume with high yield and low cost.
And I agree with Martin, the most successful product launches I've seen don't start at midfield. They start deep in the team's own zone — with Manufacturing, Fulfillment, Field Ops, and Customer Support, even Sales and Marketing, involved from the earliest stages of product development.
Choose your CM early. Include their manufacturing engineers in your design reviews. Build your support systems before you need them - test them alongside the product during your field trials. The handoff from engineering to production shouldn't be a handoff at all — it should be a play the whole team has been running from the opening snap.
I wrote about this in detail — the five handoffs that kill hardware startups, and how to get them right.