I say this is wrong, and the true reason to ship slower is when shipping something wrong is catastrophic. Let’s say you are making something well-understood li

I say this is wrong, and the true reason to ship slower is when shipping something wrong is catastrophic. Let’s say you are making something well-understood like a PCB. To me, the “ship fast” option is to make a prototype PCB fast, even if it doesn’t meet the design constraints (say, size, power consumption, cost), That’s because very few things we build are so well-understood that you can design and then ship. Development is, in its most ideal form, highly iterative and incorporates data from the field as soon as feasible. In the PCB design scenario, we want the prototype sooner because we can learn things like “this design is too sensitive to EMI”, which may necessitate a redesign or at the very minimum re-spinning the PCBs. PCBs are very similar to ICs. ICs get fewer prototypes and a more careful shipping process because it can cost millions to do a new stepping. Not because IC design is poorly understood or mysterious, but because mistakes are costly. That is the real reason you would slow down. Maybe you spend more time and money doing simulations for your ICs, maybe you have them go through more design reviews. Likewise, shipping a bad medical device or bad space probe is usually catastrophic.