 Hi everyone, my name is Gaurav Hardikar. I'm the Vice President of Product at Brilliant Smart Home, where I own product management, design, and partnerships. Brilliant is a smart home and IoT company that's focused on democratizing smart home through our experiences on the smart home control, which is our flagship product that we manufacture, as well as our mobile apps. Just for a little more detail before I start this presentation, I wanted to kind of go through what our product offering is. We have a brilliant control, which replaces an existing light switch to give you touch and voice access to lighting, music, climate, and other smart home products. Our newest products include a smart home switch and smart home plug that showcase our ability to complete smart home lighting, as well as being the center of the home. And we also have an all-in-one mobile app for use when remote, which is available across iOS and Android. For enterprise customers, we launched the Brilliant Command Center, which helps property managers become more efficient, save time and money, detect issues, and increase resident satisfaction. It's the first company for me that I've worked with manufacturers, where we manufacture consumer hardware. I gotta tell you, it's so different than my time working at Digital Product at Trulia, Zillow Group, and Shopkick. What has come of this journey is why I'm speaking Tuesday. Hardware is hard, but I promise you, it makes you a better product manager. It's improved me as a product manager in ways I never imagined. For product managers that say they're generalists, working on a physical product first will really test that ability, and I'm glad to say that I still consider myself one. So let me take you in a little bit of a history lesson here. Everyone always says hardware is hard. Silicon Valley was founded on hardware companies, but good software is impossible without sound hardware to power it. It's what's caused so much variability and experience when we compare our Windows PCs back in the day, when they all use different components, but use the same software, and why so many of us swear by Apple today because it's basically locked hardware that is very sound with also great software. When we use our iPhones and iPads today, we don't even think about it. Companies like Apple have simplified the complexities down where the intersection between what we're in software is indiscernible, as it should be. But really, when you think about emerging technologies like an IoT and smart home, these complexities are still there. And I think that's always gonna be the case when you have a new emerging medium or emerging technology, these complexity come back to life and you must address it. And who deals with that? The product development teams. This is just a quick animation of kind of how our product, the brilliant control, works from a hardware perspective. What you saw there is you have the back piece, which is the game box replacing the actual light switch. And then you have a faceplate which snaps on top, which is the brains of the entire product. And then you have your digital design baked into that, essentially kind of like a phone on the wall. As a product manager, you're the nexus of these decisions. And because you're touching both the hardware and software, each decision can have cascading effects on your users. We just raised the series be a brilliant smart home. I've been here for three and a half years. I can say I'm really familiar with how this works. It's taught me to think about user experience, explore new ways of conducting user research and become a better product manager. So let's think about these scenarios. What if you were in a case where you no longer have the ability to solve everything with a software release? How do you test for more than just a digital experience? How do you build a product team that can handle both software and hardware? And let's say now you're no longer limited to what the App Store allows or the Google Play Store allows. You can control the constraints for both the hardware and the software. What choices will you make? So the first one, not having the ability to solve everything with a software release. Whenever I was at truly a shop kick, I always had confidence in the power of a software release. It wasn't that I ever wanted to release a bad version or a bad branch or anything like that, but it did give the entire team product engineering included relief knowing that an absolute worst case scenario, a re-release or rollback could save us from further grief. You simply do not have that luxury when it's a physical product. A lot of times you do, especially if you've planned out your software tools and update process fall, but any combination of factors can impact your user experience. It could be related to the digital feature you launched, but it could be a bad part. It could be a mistake during manufacturing, a problem with the updates itself. The list is basically endless. And so as a product manager, on a product that has both this digital and physical interaction, you really need to prioritize proactiveness. And it's almost fundamental, it's key to everything you do in your daily role. You really have, I think you really have to stress that product quality is front and center for all of your development teams, not just QA. It's implementing things like product reviews during development, which we definitely did on digital design products as well, but here it becomes almost paramount to making sure that things are caught as early as possible. On the customer support side, a lot of times it's possible that on a digital product, you're a little further removed from what's actually going on from the CS part. But in this case, it's really important to preserve quality by doing, to basically checking in, being part of the customer support process and being prepared to just jump on the phone to the customer and see where you feel. I promise that you'll change some part of the development process the more you learn about each part of this. And I think especially with the customer support piece, I can't tell you how many times just me being very tied in with the CS team and my product managers also doing that has saved our butt a bunch of times. Another item that is talked about in software product management, but rarely followed, live your product daily. When I was at Trulia or when I was at Shopcake, at Trulia, I wasn't searching for a apartment on a daily basis. At Shopcake, I wasn't always shopping in physical stores every day. In this one, I live everything daily. I'm my 800 square foot, one bedroom apartment. I have four brilliant controls, five dimmer switches and a brilliant smart plug, not to mention about 30 more integrated devices that work with Brilliant. This means that every waking moment of my life, I live the Brilliant home. If there's a regression, I see it first. Here's just a quick demo of my home just so you understand kind of what I, what I live through every day. This is the mobile app experience. You can kind of go in, change different things and on the control itself, you get doorbells, you can tap in for sonos and music, just volume, a different playlist, you can enter a call between controls. I can tell you this much because this is part of my entire home, I see the regressions first. I'm very intimately involved with every part, every feature we launch and it really completes the entire message of maintaining product quality. How do you test for more than digital experience? I can't be the only user that I'm testing or monitoring for. When you're working on a physical product, you don't have the same luxuries as testing pure digital experiences. Well, again, like when I was working at Julia Arzillo or Shopkick, I had the ability to use online and virtual tools like user testing.com with digital prototypes at that point in vision and just really test things out, do quantitative surveys with people, be able to really gain a lot more research really fast. And you can control for the hardware medium easily because you can basically say it's okay, it's only web I'm testing for or I'm gonna test for a mobile app, whatever it is. When you're dealing with a physical product, it's really about the immersive experience in a user's daily journey. You're trying to understand that as that user is gonna go through their daily life, how are they gonna interact with it in more than just one interaction pattern? Meaning for brilliant, it's voice, it's touch, it's like, you know, it's physical. And there's just a lot of heavier investment required for directional input. What we do is we really want to make sure that we are identifying problem statements through key user moments. While you can't do that as much when you're in the prototype stage, we used to do things like literally built an entire prototype rig that we could carry around with us. We would actually take this to coffee shops, do scheduled sessions at different locations and try to get, you know, firsthand look and firsthand experiences from users on how things work together. Once you get past this prototype phase, we started shifting into a more serious, you know, user research and in-person study format, but it's just so very different than like I said, it's sending over a website link or an app preview and just gathering feedback that way. We, you know, since we're a lighting product, we even have a full multi-way and single pull setup using some lighting jargon there just to test the lighting setup and onboarding experience in office. On the left here, this is something that we're doing because like I said, it's a completely immersive experience and we know we don't operate off of another app store as they were constantly keeping our users in a loop, not just on a, you know, monthly or quarterly basis. We send release notes every two weeks and that really helps keep people engaged and we tend to actually get a lot of natural user feedback because it's a very key user moment. It's an update. They're gonna see new features available and they tend to respond with, you know, questions or updates and then that funnels through to the product team. Building a product team that can handle both software and hardware. You don't realize how many roles you're gonna have to play until you do something like this. When you're launching a software product, these are kind of the main, when you're thinking about launching one, you have to think about these two roles. You have to do product development. You have to think about go-to-market and within product development, there is the triangle of product design and engineering. It's something we're all familiar with. On the go-to-market side, you're usually dealing with sales, marketing and support and these two, you know, circles have to interact and product will end up leading to charge in terms of working with these go-to-market teams to go and make sure it's a successful launch. Now, when you're launching a physical product, you have all of that, plus you have the entire hardware operation side. And I just listed a few things here that you may have to think about that came to mind immediately for me is supply chain. Certifications, packaging. Now, is everything done to make sure that your physical product is certified to be released like UL certification, FCC certification? Are there packaging considerations with your physical product launch? Are there supply chain issues that are going on? You need to consider all of that before you even go forward. Because of this, you need to think about how you build a multimodal product team. At Brilliant, we have to think about aspects of all of this, not just for our own product, but also for new integrations. As if we add a new integration, they may require hardware changes if they operate our new protocol or certifications on the hardware side or at our factory for the integration. If we do considerably change the functionality, we also need to consider how our packaging should be updated. Because of all this, you can think about how that compounds with the product development, go to market teams, now timelines and product planning become really critical. Any slip up can have pretty dastardly effects across the chain. So my two cents is build a product team that matches the experience you want to build for your users. For Brilliant, that's a multimodal experience. Like I said, you can interact with it through touch, you can interact with it through site and also you can actually speak to it and hear it through our integration with Alexa. Because of that, you need to understand where product can add the most value. It may be that it's more beneficial for product to be less focused on the technical aspects and instead offer value through user experience and research. That's what we do at Brilliant. And engineering has actively played a role where product documentation and the PRD inspects have pieces from both product engineering and it isn't just a handoff. Speaking of product project planning, it won't always be your typical agile software project. It won't be the same process and that's okay. You're gonna adapt to these considerations to launch the product. Embrace it because your users will appreciate that you did. And now the craziest part of all this, you are no longer working at a company where you have a mobile app store or a set web framework, you're now controlling both the hardware and software components. What choices do you make? You're not limited by any of that. You have a much larger palette to paint from, but every single choice you make can have far reaching effects on your velocity. There's no easy trade off decisions here when hardware is in the mix. More customizability comes at a cost. You may be using a software development framework that's not necessarily built for your use case, and yet you still have to adapt it to your needs. This was like a big challenge for me at the beginning. How do I choose what's acceptable for the user experience and how do I work with the engineering team to really understand where we should invest from the technical side to build a UX for the future? Some of the UX concepts or components that become very standard on the mobile side or on other platforms may be harder to implement because just because of you're building your own OS, you're building all of your own design components yourself, that's very, very different than having a lot of that pre-built for you and just changing some visual design. So I think comes back to my first question. Whenever you work on a physical product for the first time, you're gonna be really tested. Are you truly a generalist? I don't think you really know until you've worked on a physical product. And you're gonna deal with multiple interactions and mediums that'll force you to exercise your versatility as a product manager. When working on a physical product, you'll learn both the pain of how bad decision may impact a customer, multiple level down, as well as how a good foundational decision can save you indefinitely. And you're gonna see the intersection of hardware and software and how it allows you as a product manager to connect the dots between the full user journey. You no longer think of just one medium. And with that, I'll just leave you with one thing. Every product experience begins in the physical realm. Don't self limit your scope to a single medium until you understand the full user journey. Think about exactly how your product is interacted with every single sense because we're humans and it's more than just what you see. It's a lot about how that gets encapsulated in your day. Thank you. And if you have any questions or comments, please reach out via my LinkedIn.