[roland35]

I ran into this issue even in a private company. Hardware takes a long time, and I think leadership doesn't realize how hard it actually is do get the basic functionality done RELIABLY. That is - having a demo of a working lawn mower / vacuum cleaner / whatever is fairly easy (I've seen Arduino based projects online), but having it work in variety of settings and conditions without user intervention for years takes a very long time to work out the bugs.

I think over time leadership gets frustrated with seemingly lack of progress on the foundation, while efforts to change the high level features (app, smart home integration, GPS, etc) distract from the core product. Just my 2c