Product Discovery — NewSpace Style
The software industry has reasonably clear products. Be it operating systems, enterprise suites, SaaS, office or CAD tools, video games. They can ship you something more or less concrete if you happen to have the money.
The aerospace industry has clear products: think of the likes of Boeing, Airbus, Embraer, Beechcraft, Cessna. You know what they sell. They sell flying machines. Sure, different kinds of air machines; bigger, smaller, sleeker, uglier, but airplanes at last. Granted, the aerospace industry is way bigger than those selling the big things that fly, but with these artifacts acting as the ultimate products of the industry, all the lower tier actors align well behind them.
The automotive industry has crystal clear products: cars, or more generically wheeled vehicles. Higher end, lower end, luxury, working class, utilitarian, whatever. If someone asked you what the automotive industry main product is, there would be little room for doubt.
The space industry, well, it depends. On the “traditional” side there are the big satellites sold by the usual players. Multi-ton behemoths generating kilowatts of power with their huge solar panels and all, where every bit per second of capacity achieved makes a competitive difference. But space is not only about satellites. You also have the launchers we all know, and their product is also pretty clear: a seat; a volume of space customers pay for for slinging stuff into orbit.
As you enter the waters of the so-called NewSpace, the product clarity blurs a bit. This mostly happens on the satellite side (NewSpace launchers still offer seats, no innovation there outside of the brokerage of seats in rideshares). For satellites, the product can be data, or processed analytics from the data, or satellites themselves sold standalone, or subsystems, or missions, or constellations. One single actor may offer all that, or change in time. The product fluidity is well understood and it has a strong correlation with organizational maturity. All those actors I referred to above (the Boeings, the Airbuses, the Microsofts, the Fords) have multiple decades doing their product discovery, learning their hard lessons by means of trial and error, hit and miss. And, mind you, they have bombed it big time every now and then. Each one of the ones I’ve mentioned has a significant skeleton in the closet: The 757, the A380, Windows Millennium Edition (no need for link there), the Pinto1.
Product discovery is one hell of an underrated activity in any commercial endeavor. Discovering what to offer, listening to that amorphous entity called “the market”, identifying what the product boundaries are along with the combinatorial nature of variants and flavors is definitely not simple. Moreover, every product is a bet into the future. Developing things takes time, and in some cases may take a very long time (the A380 took nearly 2 decades); by the time you get out of your R&D rabbithole, the market winds may have changed and your product is now obsolete even before seeing the light of the day. Unless, of course, you decide to purposely ignore the Gossamer Gap and you hit the market with a prototype2. With decades in the game, the established companies mentioned above can manage to absorb their product failures thanks to their structure and their hardened skin. But younger NewSpace actors, with comparatively inexperienced teams still forming and at times even with stock market tickers hanging on their heads like little numerical swords of Damocles subject to “animal spirits”, don’t have it easy. Discovering a product in such an environment must feel like trying to shoot an arrow at a bullseye while blindfolded and the target is constantly shifting and a horde of armchair expert stock speculators scream at you random things in different languages.
https://spacenews.com/op-ed-you-cant-go-to-space-on-a-ford-pinto-and-other-harsh-truths-i-learned-courting-venture-capital/
There isn’t anything necessarily wrong with that as long as you are frank about it.