Upcoming Events, Courses, and Talks

Developing a product under contract for a customer—whether through a bespoke solution, pilot program, or corporate partnership—presents unique challenges beyond standard product development. Success requires not only strong design practices, but also disciplined project management, change control, and clear customer communication.

This workshop explores the most common failure modes encountered when developing products for partners and provides practical countermeasures to address them. This session will focus on examining issues such as unclear customer needs, incorrect test procedures, unexpected component interactions, design and production challenges, and the reality that problems will occur—and must be managed effectively.

Participants will explore project and client management strategies critical to multi-organization efforts, including coordination across teams, suppliers, and customer stakeholders. Through guided workshops such as “Do We Have the Pieces in Place?” and “Do We Have the Planning in Place?”, attendees will assess their current tools, plans, and organizational readiness against proven benchmarks.

This workshop is designed to help startups and product teams deliver customer-led products more reliably, control costs, reduce delays, and build stronger long-term partnerships.

Who Should Attend

• Startup founders working with enterprise or corporate customers

• Product development and engineering leaders

• Hardware and manufacturing startups delivering custom or pilot solutions

• Teams managing complex customer requirements and change requests

• Founders navigating development contracts or strategic partnerships