I recently joined early-stage hardware start-up Grow, heading up their software engineering. This is a super exciting opportunity and a chance to work on a technically very interesting product. What does my role as Head of Software Engineering mean for a hardware start-up? It’s probably going to be mean a lot of things. At a high level, I’ll be driving the engineering practice and building out the initial engineering team.

Because we’re building a connected device and a mobile-first experience to interact with said device, the software team will build mobile apps and the cloud infrastructure to support them.

So, what is this device? Grow is building a outdoor-based automated growing system. What does this mean? The vision is a box that you can plant vegetables in and not have to stay on top of of complex schedule of caring for them. They are watered on a schedule designed for the species and current stage of life of the the plant. There’s an app you use to monitor progress remotely… and let you know about tasks you do need to do such as pruning, harvesting, etc.

Here’s are some pictures of our first prototype.

Grow Prototype - Box & Board

Software wise, there a lot of really interesting problems to solve.

1. Data retrieval from the bed. If we’re taking care of your plant, we need to pull relatively recent data from it giving us a picture of what’s happening. Soil moisture levels, temperature, etc.. How do we get this data? (Bluetooth, Cellular, Wifi?)
2. Handling gardens with n number of beds.. i.e. scaling.
3. Dynamic watering programs. Customizing the behavior of each bed to what is planted in it and it’s needs.
4. Data capture/analysis of what’s getting grown successfully and funneling this learning back into product/software design.
5. Early stage validations of hardware components. (Lab testing)
6. Effective user testing. What do we put in front of users first? What do we need to capture when we do this.

I’m super excited to be stepping into a pure leadership role and the challenges that come with that as well!