[teampractices] Juicero as a case study supporting Agile methods

Mon May 29 22:17:44 UTC 2017

I hesitate to expect a hardware product to be developed using "agile"
methods. Especially one that requires negotiating with suppliers who must
provide compatible hardware (the juice packs, in this case). Agile relies
on a low cost of change to really work well. My gut says that this story is
more about the value of "lean", and especially "lean startup".

I have to wonder why they went for a fancy "squeeze the whole pack at once"
mechanism, rather than pulling the pack through rollers, along the lines of
a Mangle[1]. Sometimes, 500-year-old technology is appropriate.

Just this past weekend, I spoke with a Juicero owner (or more accurately,
the spouse of a Juicero owner). She was laughing (ironically) about how it
refused to make juice unless it was connected to the internet[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangle_(machine)
[2] I don't know if that's true or not, but it's what she claimed

Kevin Smith
Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation

On Thu, May 18, 2017 at 11:57 AM, Joel Aufrecht <jaufrecht at wikimedia.org>
wrote:

> 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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