I’ve seen hundreds of hardware products over my career. The ones that fail almost always fail for the same reason: they nailed one thing and ignored the others.

Every successful product has to satisfy three requirements simultaneously:

1. Technical Requirements

Does it work?

This is where engineers live. Can we hit the specs? Does the motor have enough torque? Will the battery last long enough? Does the firmware run reliably?

Technical requirements are necessary but not sufficient. I’ve seen plenty of products that worked perfectly and still failed.

2. Business Requirements

Can we make money?

This is the one engineers forget. What does it cost to manufacture? What’s the margin at the target price point? Can we actually produce this at scale?

A product that works but costs too much to build is a science project, not a business.

3. User Requirements

Will anyone want it?

The hardest one to get right. Does this solve a real problem? Is the solution better than what exists? Will people actually change their behavior to use it?

A product that works and is profitable but nobody wants is… well, it’s inventory.

The Failure Modes

When you miss one of these, you get predictable failure modes:

Miss technical: A product that doesn’t work. Obvious failure.

Miss business: A product people love but kills your company. You can’t sustain it.

Miss user: A product that works great and makes sense on paper, but sits unsold.

The Discipline

The best product teams check all three boxes constantly. Not once at the start — throughout development.

  • Does this new feature still work? (technical)
  • Does it still hit our cost target? (business)
  • Does the user still want it? (user)

Every decision gets filtered through all three lenses.

The Shortcut

The fastest way to validate all three? Build something and put it in front of real users.

A prototype tells you whether it works (technical). A BOM tells you whether you can afford it (business). User feedback tells you whether anyone cares (user).

Don’t spend six months in PowerPoint trying to figure this out. Build something. Learn. Iterate.

At Expertise Engineering, we help teams navigate all three requirements — technical, business, and user. Let’s talk about what you’re building.