Actually being in Shenzhen where the product gets made has been really important for us. I'm a biomedical engineer by training. My gut reaction in most phases

Actually being in Shenzhen where the product gets made has been really important for us. I'm a biomedical engineer by training. My gut reaction in most phases of product development is to dive in and engineer the problem myself. It took me a while to realize this: I'll never be able to ship on time if I tried to engineer everything. Turning myself into a product manager has increased the pace of our product development by at least an order of magnitude. Instead of taking detailed measurements of my device and building a three-dimensional model to send over, I take my product designer's sketches and a prototype to a case manufacturer. He comes up with a rough version, we go back and forth, and a few iterations later it's what I want. Oh, and in the process we've figured out what could be made more efficiently and what isn't actually all that useful. Hardware prototyping is slow when you're doing it all yourself. If you're willing to tug on and navigate the Shenzhen supply chain and concentrated manufacturing brain power, you can iterate at speeds that can at times rival software.