[11thEarlOfMar]

Product Engineering as a role is also critical in hardware companies, where discipline-focused engineers such as mechanical, electrical, firmware, etc. need to implement the features of the product. Many times, they fall into the trap of making an impressive feature set work and then thinking they can start selling the product.

What is missed are critical design elements such as:

- Cost of materials/assembly

- Power consumption and distribution

- Reliability of the system

- Durability of the system

- Supply chain integrity and robustness

- ...

It seems that a lot of the new robotics companies and many KickStarter projects fall into this trap: under-budget the product development, both in time and resourcing, and release their product prematurely.

This is all quite obvious to people who have participated in successful consumer or enterprise hardware companies, but young companies are still vulnerable. Advice would be to get it all working as a prototype, then, expect another major project of turning it into a Product before releasing.

[DavidChouinard]

Hardware teams have been explicit about this role for a long time. I wish I had first-hand experience of hardware product engineering, but it's certainly an inspiration for this essay.