I worked on a consumer robotics project which had great promise (in my biased take at least) but ultimately was canceled and scrapped due to poor management lea

I worked on a consumer robotics project which had great promise (in my biased take at least) but ultimately was canceled and scrapped due to poor management leadership in my opinion. It is expensive to bring a hardware group up and running, and I believe that there were expectations to create a class-leading product from nothing in under 5 years when it should have been at least 10 (see iRobot's Terra project timeline). It was a very exciting project and I am slowly getting over it's untimely and premature demise :( The constant changing of requirements was a challenge but that is normal for any engineering project. I think the ultimate problem was the lack of understanding of the "Iron Triangle[1]" in project management. The company wanted it Fast Fast Fast Cheap and Good (in that order) but my team was trying to make it Good Cheap Fast (in that order). So, I think if we did it all over again we would have reprioritized from the beginning and dropped all the complicated design decisions we made, and work on those in version 2 just like any good MVP[2]!! I think the key for a successful hardware project is strong technical leadership who understands the pitfalls and timelines of designing the mechanical, electrical, and software as well as can evaluate when and where to build vs buy across the project lifetime. With robotics in particular it is also important to understand how we can limit the environment to make things easier for the robot to operate, with things like magnetic or painted stripes on a floor, ultrawideband beacons, things like that. Making an autonomous system robust is difficult enough in a controlled environment! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle [2] Some examples of things we could have completely dropped to save development time: Bluetooth and phone app, designing low cost custom motor drives, use standard materials instead of injection molded parts