Today I was told I’d be leading the smart products group at DeepCool. The catch: there is no group yet. No org chart, no headcount, no codebase. The fan product line stays on my plate. On top of that, I now own everything “smart” we don’t yet make — a control hub, peripherals, desk accessories, light strips, and the software stack that wires the whole thing together. The company has never shipped consumer software. That gap is supposed to close, and I’m supposed to be the one who closes it.
I want to write the part where I’m grateful, and I am. The past two years of industrial design here led somewhere I didn’t quite predict. Hardware is what I came from; getting room to push into software is more than I asked for. The story I’m telling myself: this is the larger lever you wanted.
I also want to write the part where I’m scared. From-zero is romantic in a deck and ugly in practice. Hire who? Build what first? How do you stand up an embedded team and a UI team and a brand voice for a software product, all in the same quarter? I’ve shipped industrial design. I’ve never built an organization that ships everything at once. The honest answer to “can you do this?” is I don’t know yet.
What I’m telling myself
A few notes I’m leaving for the next few months of myself:
- The work is the same as ID work, just bigger. Define the user, define the problem, define what good looks like, then make a thing that does that. The medium changes; the discipline doesn’t.
- Hire slow. Especially the first three.
- Pick the smallest possible v1 of the software. Not the prettiest — the smallest. Ship it, then earn the right to make the prettier one.
- Don’t pretend to have answers I don’t have.
On this blog
I’ve been keeping this notebook intermittently. It’s about to get more intermittent. I don’t know when I’ll be back here — when something feels honest enough to put down, I will. If that’s once a month, fine. If it’s once a year, fine too.
一切随缘.