Making Things Happen Blog Lean Hardware

If you ask me what lean hardware development is and you have a background in software or the startup economy the explenation is short: lean startup applied to physical product development. The more interesting conversation starts if you do not have a software background. Developing software products the weapon of choice to minimize risk & waste and at the same time maximize chances of success & return of invest these days is lean entrepreneurship: agile software development tightly glued to lean startup product development.So what does this mean for the development process of physical goods? Can it be applied to my average internet of things project too? You might have guessed - the answer is: yes! I'll elaborate it using as little buzzwords as possible so you can concentrate on the advantages of the concept of lean hardware itself.The mood lamp.What you see here is the hardware manifestation of the starting point of my approach of developing web apps: a minimum viable product. It is a prototype that represents the minimum set of features to be viable to its users by delivering a certain value. It's also viable to its producers to validate the proposition of the value they had in mind to be delivered to their customers. Question is: What Is It?It's the mood light - using the rat pack internet of things framework for rapid iot prototyping and a sentiment analysis web api to mix colors depending on the percentage of positive, neutral and negative tweets that relate to a given hashtag: red for negative, blue for neutral and green for positive moods. Rather minimal although already proposing a certain value: delight the attendees of an event for the time of their visit by displaying the mood of the event's twitter timeline intuitively.Mood Lamp User LabSpring 2012 the fabulous Digiwomen asked if I could build something physical that's somehow related to social media to kick off the Social Media Week with a blast. So I started that minimal to get the product in contact with real users early and to weave in their feedback and more important their reaction to shape the face of the product. This technique is called validated learning or rapid prototyping. Back to our value proposition: delighting the attendees of an event for the time of their visit.The first test drives of this hypothesis took place at selected local events: the picture above shows a hacktable and I also took the prototype with me to a CoCreact! Workshop where I actually sketched making things happen's value proposition, which is another story ;-).The first reaction of users to a product can be bitter medicine: you spent half a year developing something you thought they'd love and then it turns out they don't exactly do so. Sweet time wasted. But wait - I did not spend such a ridiculous amount of time before confronting myself with a first feedback, did I? First user feedback & the first reactions too are always a surprise. Sometimes rather small suprises. Sometimes they are of epic dimension. In our case the first reactions are solid fun. Turns out confronting the value proposition with The Reality proved it wrong. The reactions showed people were interested in this object - but delight was yet to be added. The rate of change of the colors made it more appealing for a chilled, snoozy room like setting. Which is cool unless you're briefed to open an event with a big bang of attention.In this situation you can either persevere - stay on course - or pivot - change the direction you're moving. Basically the element of sentiment represenation proved itself quite handy. Persevere. But the way I represented it needed a little pivot. Or perhaps even a huge one ;-).Sometimes you have to pivot hard: hacked Vinyl KillerQuite out of the blue I started collaborating with my partner in crime Jeremy who told me about this toy his kids played with - a little plastic VW bulli that drives around a record using an integrated needle and speakers to actually play the vinyl it moves on. "What's it called?" "It's a Vinyl Killer". You could tell it by the look on my face: we found our new direction: a Vinyl Killer playing a record in different speeds according to the mood of an event's twitter stream was the way to go.Missing LinkI prototyped the missing links: regulating the voltage of the toy via our online Arduino devices and adjusting the software to ditch neutral moods - how boring anyways. The first users' reactions were more than promising. A quick check against the initial value proposition "Delighting the attendees of an event for the time of their visit" made me finally say: value proposition validated! It's proved itself fun, easy to understand and just the show act the event organizers had in mind for its starting event. Minimum Viable Product ready for action. You can have a look at this video from the event to see how it went :-).On the bottom line please keep in mind: when developing basically anything - the lean entrepreneurship (aka lean startup) approach makes you flexible enough to respond to user feedback & more important the behaviour of people using your product. Be it software, hardware or conceptual / strategic work: moving fast in slow steps reduces risks and maximizes your chances of success by making you - lean actually.