 All right. Hello everybody. My name is Tomer. Thank you for joining me here today at Product School for this brief presentation about hardware and software PMing. You know, I recognize there's a lot of different flavors to PMing, but this is kind of based on my own personal experience working in both areas, if you will. Of course, there are things that are similar, but then there's a lot that is different. And I hope that this presentation will serve you as maybe a guide to choosing the correct path for you. If you are early in your career or are pivoting into product management, just getting finished with school, this might be something that you could be interested in. And I wrote here in parentheses, these are the things I wish I knew. These are things that may have guided my decisions early in my career. All right. So short introduction of myself. There's some logos on the screen. This is basically my career. I started off working on defense-related products, then moved to the U.S. to get my MBA at Duke University. Right after graduation is when I started working at Microsoft. I worked for Surface, which is a hardware product. And then now I am working at Google, which is, of course, predominantly software. They do have some hardware offerings. I won't go into the details of my day-to-day job. This will be a general overview of kind of my experiences. All right. So first of all, I think we need to do some definitions here. What is hardware and what is software? Right. So, for example, your smartphone versus any application that you may have installed on it. So the smartphone is a piece of hardware and the app is a piece of software. I think that's pretty obvious. But then there are places where this gets complicated. Like, for example, the drivers on any operating system that you have, either your phone or your laptop, are those the firmware? Are those software or hardware? Or a combination of the two? Then think about things like accessories that are attached to hardware devices, like your phone cover or protective screens. Are those hardware? Pretty obvious, yeah. But are they hardware in the classical sense that you and I might be thinking about? Are they technological enough to be considered a product? Depends. Cloud services. So the services are definitely software, but they're running on huge servers and server farms that are obviously hardware machines. When you provision a virtual machine, you're provisioning a remote piece of hardware. You're using software to do that. So the line gets a little bit blurry and complicated. Bottom line here is if you're considering a role like this and it's not completely clear to you, just go ahead and make sure you understand the scope of that role and what is really expected of you, more on hardware, more on the software side. It will really depend on the team that you're joining or the organization that you're joining and how it is structured. Okay, so a little bit of definitions there hopefully helps you sort things out a little bit. Now, let's talk about things that are similar. So obviously the soft skills. You know, the soft skills are things like cross-functional teamwork, being able to influence without authority, a good ability to story tell, storytelling communication, being able to convey your vision and strategy for the product that you are in charge of, and just ultimately being the voice of the customer. So sitting in those meetings, being able to articulate your customers' pain points and what's bothering them and why that should be solved now versus later. So negotiations. So those are the soft skills and mostly those are similar. So if you feel like you're good at that or improving, then awesome. Kudos to you. Keep those well sharpened and ready to go. It's not going to change whether you're in hardware or software. Now on to some differences. That is the majority of this deck here. So time moves differently. What does that really mean? So I found that in software and hardware, the rhythm and lead time of these products is very different. So with hardware projects, you may get 12 to 24 months even of lead time, meaning the time between you kick off the product that you're working on until the time that it is generally available or that it is launched. Also, those end dates or deadlines are usually pretty hard. So you know, there's a launch event coming up. That's probably not going to move by a whole lot. If it moves, then it's maybe going to move a full year or maybe your product is actually going to get canceled. So hardware has long lead time and they're pretty solid. The times are pretty solid. Software moves in short sprints. You've heard the term sprints, I'm pretty sure. And sometimes it's just as fast as those release cycles. So you'll have, every time you have a new version, it's going to release and go to general availability. There's not going to be a launch event. People are just going to get like an update on their machines. But it is not going to GA. So those rhythms are very, very different. Hardware cycles back to hardware. So hardware cycles are predictable. And remember, I said those times are pretty solid. You know, there are companies that we've grown used to getting hardware from every year at a specific month. So we know something is coming and you can bet there are teams that are working towards that date. So if you are early in your career, maybe think about timing here. If you're considering joining a hardware product or a hardware producing company, and you know that they have a launch tentatively planned for the next six months, that might be a good time to join because you may be able to benefit some early impact, early wins in your career. You won't have to wait a full year or 24 months until you get, you know, that awesome new shiny bullet point on our resume, right? Okay. Next difference. Yeah, plans change. So this picture of the evergreen stuck in the Suez canal is an example of how big ships are hard to maneuver. Okay, so hardware changes are much more painful. It is very hard to steer the course of a big ship, just as it is hard to change the plans for a hardware product. Making mistakes in hardware is very, very costly and then fixing them is even more costly. So sometimes you would see hardware products in hardware groups leaning on software for those fixes. So it sounds like patchwork, but ultimately it is the optimal thing to have that hardware launch in time and with minimal cost. So the software will be the one picking up the slack. When you deal with software that is related to hardware, that has its toll as well. I talked earlier about drivers and firmware. It will get harder and harder for you to push changes into low level firmware and drivers. The more mature the product is in its lifetime. So if it's right about ready to go, about to go a general availability, the chances that you will have to put in any last minute changes into software, low level software is small. So take that into consideration. And lastly about this, a lot of features and the things that you as a product manager would want to push into your product, get left on the cutting room floor when you deal with hardware. It probably shouldn't be any surprise to you that a lot of the hardware we see every year is basically just incremental improvement on the previous generation. You don't really see a lot of things that are totally novel that you've never seen before that have a completely new set of features because it's really hard to take risk on those products. I'll talk about that in a minute, but it is just not a lot of data that you can go on. And there's a lot of impact in terms of supply chain and resources and factory. Think about things like physical safety of your device users. Think about battery. You've seen batteries inflate maybe somewhere online. That is not a place that hardware manufacturers want to be. And so it's really those considerations that ultimately leave a lot of things on the cutting room floor and you as a product manager need to have the stomach to kind of, you know, okay, I'll take it. I'll try it next time. Maybe I'll think of something even more novel or have more customer sentiment behind this new feature. All right. Next, I alluded to this a minute ago. So really, when you deal with hardware, there is not a lot of data to go on, right? So especially if you're thinking about something that's really new that the market has never seen before. I think there's a famous quote by Henry Ford that asks if you asked someone, you know, what would they like to see in their next chariot? They would say faster horses. They never imagined a car. So it's kind of like that. The customer said that you have to interview and get some early feedback from is very small. The hardware that you're working on is probably confidential. And so getting that out to customers to test and give you feedback on is hard and then making sure that nothing leaks is even harder. I bet you have all seen leaks of hardware online. That is something that, you know, hardware companies don't like. It's not great for their PR and it reduces from their launch moment. So it's very hard to get data. It's kind of my bottom line here with software. It's much, much easier, right? Every company nowadays collects data and in some way about their users anonymized, of course, and but just using that data to educate themselves about what the customer needs, even though they might not be talking about it or articulating it verbally, verbally, right? So you end up doing guesswork. So just guessing following your gut instincts, some little data and anecdotal information that you have in hardware. Last point here for differences is around strategy, okay? So think about the strategy for your product, especially for hardware. So hardware oftentimes is not there for the sake of itself. What do I mean by that? So when you deal with hardware, oftentimes the play is an ecosystem play. Think about devices from Alexa, right? Alexa Home, Alexa Dot. Those devices are cheap, like really cheap. I don't actually know the numbers. I didn't work for Amazon for Alexa, but I would assume that they're running on a very low margin, if that. Here in the picture, you see Amazon's Alexa Microwave. And you look at something like this and you think, hey, what gives? This is super weird. Why would I have a microwave with the legs in it? And that's because the microwave is not there to be a microwave. It's there to be the vehicle for Alexa. So the vehicle for the Amazon ecosystem. So the vehicle for you to get more out of Prime and using Prime even more. So it's spinning that flywheel for Amazon, even though the hardware itself is very, very cheap. And so if you sit in, if you're on a team like that and you're starting to think about your strategy, your strategy really shouldn't be how many units you're selling every year, but it should be more something like, how am I lifting up this ecosystem that is called Alexa and Amazon and Prime? Those are metrics that are hard to find, but if you're good at it, then basically that'll make your job much easier. Software is often more there for its own sake. So software, if you're like a recurring revenue type of service, you'll start seeing direct impact of your product with hardware. Again, it's more indirect than anything else. Yeah, basically that's it there. So with this final slide, I want to give you kind of tips for your early years of your career. So consider your timing. If you're joining a hardware product, if you're in it for a quick win or you're just interested in really accelerating your career, think about when you join those companies. Are you more the type that likes to firefight or are you more the type that likes to multi-thread? So firefighting means you're just taking out the fire as they come up. That will be mostly the work you have in software or are you multi-threading? So with hardware, because of the lead time, the long lead time, you'd have to have multiple guns and multiple ovens to start landing those in succession. How do you think about strategy and foresight versus data? So with software, there's lots of data usually. And with hardware, you basically need to use anecdotal data and a bit, use your gut instinct, use foresight and have more strategy. And then last point here is that nothing is set in stone. Transitioning is possible between hardware and software, but I'll just say that in my experience, it's not straightforward. You may have to take another step along the way, maybe take another course or a semester at school to plug the gap on some knowledge. And you will for sure need to tweak your resume if you're going to move from one area to the other to make it so that your interviewer understands that you have those soft skills that are similar and that you can understand those areas very quickly around but quickly in stone. That's it. Thank you all for joining today. Feel free to find me on social media. That is my handle on LinkedIn and other places. So I look forward to hearing from you and I hope you enjoyed this presentation. Thanks, everybody.