147: Transition from Hardware Product Startup to Hardware Scale-Up

With Morgan Teachworth, VP of Engineering at Cisco Meraki

Hosted by Kevin Mako of TriMech Design Solutions

147: Transition from Hardware Product Startup to Hardware Scale-Up
147: Transition from Hardware Product Startup to Hardware Scale-Up

Morgan Teachworth was the Head of Hardware at Meraki, which was acquired by Cisco for $1.2 billion dollars, and is now Cisco’s VP of Engineering & Supply Chain. He has been involved in the development of hundreds of physical mass-manufactured products, leading to approximately 16 million units of his products being sold around the world in his 15-year tenure with the organization. Today, Morgan is going to share some valuable knowledge on how inventors, startups, and small manufacturers can understand the difference between developing a product to sell as a startup and developing products to sell as a growing scale-up brand, as well as what you can do to best strategize for this kind of explosive hardware company growth in the product space.

Today you will hear us talk about:

  • How the customer changes as you scale your hardware product business
  • Your customers become your salesforce in the very early stages
  • Your next tier of customers are the wholesalers, distributors, resellers, etc.
  • What are some new stakeholders
  • Think about the factory, the installers, the resellers, 
  • How do the stakeholders
  • Micro stakeholders and macro stakeholders
  • You can tune the product design, the packaging, the product experience, the manufacturing, all around multiple stakeholders
  • Simplicity is an important part of design considerations, but in all other stakeholders, this should be considered, too.
  • Your values have to be pushed through your supply chain
  • Keep your product simple, it’s actually easier to do as a small physical product business than it is as you grow, so start now.
  • As you grow, you become the big incumbent now that other small innovators are trying to take on.
  • Cross-functional initiatives help as you scale.

EPISODE LINKS

The Product Startup Podcast Links:

Mako Design Links:

Kevin Mako Links:

Thanks for tuning in! See you next time.