[teampractices] Juicero as a case study supporting Agile methods

[Joel Aufrecht]

While that's not the specific point of this article from Bolt about
Juicero's hardware development story
<https://blog.bolt.io/heres-why-juicero-s-press-is-so-expensive-6add74594e50>,
I think it fits well with their thesis:

> Juicero raised nearly $120M from well-known investors before shipping a
> single unit. The team spent over two years building an incredibly complex
> product and the ecosystem to support it. Aside from the flagship juice
> press, Juicero built relationships with farmers, co-packing/food-processing
> facilities, complex custom packaging, beautifully designed mobile/web
> applications, and a subscription delivery service. But they did all this
> work without the basic proof that this business made sense to consumers.
>
Constraints during the earliest stages of a hardware company’s life force
> founders to carefully allocate resources to find creative solutions. I hope
> this post serves as a lesson to other hardware startups that spending tens
> of millions of dollars on product development prior to shipping a single
> unit is a goal that’s not worth striving for.
>
Juicero has had a very troubled launch
<http://gizmodo.com/the-mad-king-of-juice-inside-the-dysfunctional-origins-1795330639>
:

Juicero has by any measure gotten the public comeuppance it richly deserved
> since launching at the end of last March. The company had its juice press
> torn down in April as “hopelessly expensive
> <https://blog.bolt.io/heres-why-juicero-s-press-is-so-expensive-6add74594e50>
> to manufacture and assemble,” and has since slashed its sale price nearly
> in half in January. This, right after a Bloomberg expose revealed the press
> itself was made redundant by the simple human hand
> <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-19/silicon-valley-s-400-juicer-may-be-feeling-the-squeeze>,
> which can squeeze the produce bags well enough.
>

If you take Bolt's assessment of their achievements at face value, then I
think that building the device, the facilities, the packaging, the
applications, and the service for $120 million is not a terrible price;
many IT projects have done less with more money.  But all of that is
worthless if there's no market, and it would have been better for them to
find out earlier.




*-- Joel Aufrecht*
Team Practices Group
Wikimedia Foundation
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