The process debt holding hardware teams back
Hardware engineering teams everywhere are busier than ever, working leaner and moving faster to deliver their products to market. With this speed, optimizing their product development processes takes a back seat to product delivery. At EverCurrent, we believe product delivery should go hand-in-hand with process management to keep the team aligned on the right tasks and to flag risks long before they occur.
Two weeks ago, Ye (EverCurrent’s Founder and CEO) and Devansh (who runs the Artificial Intelligence Made Simple platform) had a live chat about artificial intelligence in hardware product development. Their conversation covered AI adoption, hardware engineering use cases, and lessons learned in building EverCurrent.
Three topics stood out from their conversation:
Hardware engineers are already using AI tools: whether for quick queries or uploading some of their data into ChatGPT, but these efforts are siloed and the knowledge is not shared across their teams. As we learned at CES, executives have realized the need for an organizational approach in implementing these tools for hardware engineering teams.
Staying competitive in the market requires hardware engineering teams to stay lean and move faster while managing growing complexity. One of the risks of this speed is having gaps between their requirements and builds throughout the product development cycle. Engineering managers are thinking about ways to proactively surface gaps and risks across tools, functions, and product lines for a realistic business view.
While engineers have heroic moments (where they fix a firmware bug or mill a new part overnight so that the product makes it to a customer the next day) that make for great stories, more predictable processes make hardware teams work more efficiently. Tools that reduce the risk of rework, of re-implementing solutions already tried, and free up engineers’ time for complex tasks are immensely needed.
Watch the full livestream below; you can read Devansh’s recap here: a16z Founder on How to unlock extra capacity for hardware development