One of my former Sonos colleagues once told me the single wisest thing I’ve ever heard about hardware product development:

“We’re a product development organization. We don’t actually make speakers. We make instructions for how to make speakers. Our only real output is paper.”

(I originally attributed this to Sara Lincoln, but Sara tells me that she got it, in turn, from Ron Roberts, the mechanical guru who’s designed a ton of iconic Sonos products.)

I was in my mid twenties when I heard this, and scoffed. I was an electrical engineer. I designed circuit boards. That was my output. Not dry instructions. That’s not nearly as cool.

God, what a fool I was.

There are so many wrenches to turn, and holes to drill, and wire harnesses to tie, and components to solder, that it’s simply not possible for one human to do them all at scale. Process is how you access that scale. Because process, at its core, is access to other people’s time. In the world of consumer devices, that’s generally time bought at the cheapest possible hourly rate. That should give you some idea why the Foxconns and Inventecs of the world have a large presence in China. That’s where you can buy human hours for some of the lowest possible rates. (It also explains why we increasingly see many of these CMs opening facilities in Southeast Asia. China’s burgeoning middle class is not as cheap of hourly labor as it once was - and the looming Taiwan crisis is certainly not going to make Chinese-made goods any cheaper, should it come to pass.)

I don’t really believe this capability is gone in the US. I think it’s just gotten more niche, and more effective. Long gone is the era of tens of thousands of people trudging into a mill, or a Ford plant, day in and out. Instead, operators are shifting to smaller, more specialized manufacturers. I see this all the time around the Atlanta, GA metro area. My present role brings me there with some frequency, and I’m coming to realize: there is a lot of manufacturing in Atlanta. (Well, at least more of the kind I enjoy. I wouldn’t call Massachusetts a manufacturing center for anything besides pharmaceuticals - and chemistry has never really been my thing.) You can get all kinds of stuff made in Atlanta if you know where to look: circuit designs, PCB assembly, final product test, injection molding tools, bed of nails fixtures… And this is just the stuff I know about.

I digress more than a bit from my point, which is: there are plenty of people - particularly in startups - that don’t recognize at all how important it is to access other people’s time, and that process is key to developing that access.

As soon as you need to do something more than once, it starts becoming important to get someone cheaper to do it.

The years I’ve spent outside the consumer electronics industry have made it clear to me how rare this mindset is.

My short diversion into the defense industry indicates that there are plenty of folks out there who are happy to sell bodies to DARPA, or RCO, or some other DOD proxy in exchange for a 9% fee on each hour sold. Not only that - they’re building some reasonably successful small businesses in the process! (Scaling up an Anduril or a Trail of Bits or a Palantir: well, that’s another topic for another day.)

The inefficiencies involved boggle my mind. I’ve worked at more than a few places where getting an engineer whose hourly rate is north of $150 to do things like drill holes in plastic enclosures, or solder cable assemblies - for days or weeks at a time. Even more boggling is when this scenario seems like a good use of time to the folks in charge. Clearly, the math looks very different when you’re on the receiving end of the 9% contract fee for each hour charged.

But the thing that confuses me most is that there are plenty of hardware engineers in these environments who don’t see this as a waste of their time. You’d rather drill holes, or crimp connectors, or solder wires? Rock on, you beautiful snowflake - but the world does not turn on solder joints alone. These are jobs any reasonably diligent 16 year old could do. Wouldn’t you rather hire them at a fair (but cheaper) rate, so you can go design more circuit boards, or FIPS certified enclosures?

It brings to mind Omar Bradley’s famous quote: “Amateurs discuss tactics, while professionals talk logistics.” Which, in bastardized form, provides the title of this essay.