I make a lot of mistakes. Fortunately not too many are catastrophic or unsalvageable. Through those mistakes comes the ethos to my approach at solving complex problems. Flexibility and the expectation of pivoting is critical, keeping the passion is a priority, and identifying, solving, and reevaluating technical unknowns is the best way to remove risk.
Even though I’m an electrical engineer by degree, I’ve found that having a diverse skill set is super valuable—for both me and the organizations I’ve worked with. Tackling complex problems often calls for some intuition and sometimes a bit of blind exploration. Is the issue mechanical or software? Can it be patched in firmware? spin a new board? Past experience says “yeah, probably”—and it’s likely a mix of all of them.
Diving deeper into other fields within the greater ‘product development’ has led to more elegant design and continues to sharpen my intuition—it keeps me driven and passionate about solving problems.
“Eating your own dogfood” is most often heard in the software world, but it’s equally—if not more—important in product. Tooling costs are often an immovable wall of constraint when fixing problems later. “A penny now is a pound later.” and the answer is quality prototyping and a bit of exploration. This same thought can often apply to less CapEx
