EE 292I: Insanely Great Products: How do they get built?

Course Description

Great products are crafted by product teams, commonly composed of engineering, product management, and customer support. We start by identifying unmet market needs and then satisfying those needs through an iterative process of building from functional infancy to market leadership. In this class, we seek to demystify this process through direct conversations with guests who've delivered immensely successful products. We aim to introduce how great hardware and software products are crafted -- in both startups and larger companies. Students will learn why pursuing areas of interest and curiosity is critical to building world-class solutions to problems. Previous companies profiled: Apple, HP, Microsoft, VMWare, Genentech, Blue Bottle Coffee, Pixar, and Pivotal Labs -- to name a few. Previous guests include Ted Hoff (Inventor of the microprocessor and employee #12 at Intel), Diane Greene (Co-founder and CEO of VMware, former President of Google Cloud, and former Chair of The MIT Corporation), Rob Mee (Co-Founder of Pivotal Labs and Founder of Mechanical Orchard), Evans Hankey (former VP of Design at Apple), Matt Kraning (EE292i Alumnus, Co-Founder Expanse, acquired by Palo Alto Networks where Matt now serves as CTO Cortex), and Jon Rubinstein (NeXT, Apple, Palm). Pre-requisites: None