I disagree. There are plenty of different fabrication technologies to suit different scales. Some listed by other commenters. I agree iteration is good, and g

I disagree. There are plenty of different fabrication technologies to suit different scales. Some listed by other commenters. I agree iteration is good, and good hardware companies do iterate hardware. It's something I have always been a proponent of as a hardware engineer. But also the reality is that everything in hardware land costs 10-100 times as much and takes 10-100 times longer. To properly develop and iterate on hardware, you need to do upfront investment. You need: 1) Tools for the hardware engineers (scopes, spec-ans, tool shop, test equipment). [In software parlance, download the IDE, debuggers and libraries. You're not going to ask your developers to work without those. That would be ludicrous.] 2) You need to iterate EARLY in the product cycle process and this costs money (but still much less than changing your final tooling). [Software parlance again: You only ever really edit the source code. You would never ask a developer to binary patch a compiler to fix issues in your source code. This is what you're doing IMO when changing final tooling on a product.] 3) You need to account for lead times for fabrication and shipping of a physical thing. [Software parlance again: Compiling takes days to weeks. QA weeks to months.] I think software majority companies struggle with these because (when compared to hardware): 1) Software tooling is essentially free. 2) You can stop and go back to the source code to re-iterate at any time and the down stream processes to "finish the iteration". 3) Time for iteration is seconds, minutes maybe hours while you wait for a compiler to run. Speaking about Toyota Production System: This has many misconceptions as nobody ever seems to actually read the source material. One of these myths is iterations. Toyota iterate often and EARLY. You get the part right and THEN you can THINK about final tooling. They don't iterate on final tooling, that is expensive and time consuming. I would say with some work and trade offs you can save on your product in the 300-500 range. You shouldn't be in the Defense/Aerospace/Medical area unless you are doing something quite esoteric. As others have stated on the final point (but I will reiterate) no senior software person in the US would be happy with $20 for 30 minutes.