As winter approaches, here's a story about why hardware is hard. ❄️🥶

About a year ago, we started getting reports from the field about undesirable behavior when our robots were turned on. They would behave unpredictably. Our engineering and CS team investigated all such reports to try to discover the root cause. Every time a report came in from the field, we'd immediately troubleshoot. We'd bring the robot back in house to try to replicate the failure.

Five years ago I didn't get the difference between roles like sales, mktg, product, project mgmt, cust success. They're all interrelated, but if you distinguish these roles in your company (even if all are done by one person at first), it makes growth easier. Sales: meet revenue targets by closing deals. Assisted by sales enablement (coaching), sales ops (KPIs and dashboards), customer success (getting existing customers to buy more).

1/ I ran Field Operations for a fleet of 70 hotel robots at my last company, and now @DustyRobotics is starting to deploy units in the field too. Here's what I've learned. 👇 2/ Engineering never builds all the features customers need for a smooth customer experience. That gap is bridged by your field team, who actually have boots on the ground and feel the pain when the product falls short of what customers want.

Hardware is hard. While a lot of innovative practices have emerged for software development, many are not applicable to robotics. Thread: 👇 1/9 Test-driven development: when the operation of your system relies on inputs from the real world (eg, a construction site), it's challenging to simulate reality in high enough fidelity to do useful unit testing. 2/9