What makes hardware hard?

Last Tuesday, with our friends at Informal Spaces, EverCurrent hosted the Oakland Hardware Meetup. The meetup welcomed more than 60 engineers from the Bay Area. Central to EverCurrent’s mission to improve the capacity of hardware teams, we engaged the community to learn about the biggest challenges they face in their daily work. Ye, our founder, led a session by placing each participant into a group of six where they shared their unique experiences.

The engineers coalesced around three main issues:

1. Hardware teams, due to their cross-functional nature, often do not have one source of truth. Instead, each member of the team maintains their own tools that drive their work.

2. Scope creep occurs as hardware teams grow. With expanding programs and customers, engineering tasks grow affecting their ability to keep track of the decisions made during the product development process.

3. Engineers burn out from being spread too thin and having low visibility on the progress made across the program. As one engineer shared, workplaces soon become places “where everyone is busy but not enough is getting built.”

After some deliberation, the participants also shared ideas to mitigate the challenges raised. The solutions included faster decision making so that all members of the team are aligned without having repeated meetings, realistic scheduling of tasks based on priorities and available resources, and communicating clear organization-wide goals with prioritized action items. These ideas resonated with us at EverCurrent as we’re developing workflows that enable visibility across cross-functional hardware teams.

After the activity, participants had opportunities to pitch themselves, companies, or solutions they were seeking from the audience over some pizza, drinks, and pastries. We’re thankful to the community for showing up and sharing their hard learned lessons, as well as taking time to unwind, connect with the community, and form new relationships.