The Hidden Cost of Early Design Decisions
Hardware respins driven by preventable design decisions cost between $50,000 and $500,000 in direct engineering expense. That’s before you account for schedule impact on market windows that rarely reopen. Software rework compounds the problem: rewriting BSP integrations, rebuilding OTA pipelines, and re-architecting firmware stacks after a late-stage compute platform change are each expensive engineering efforts in their own right. They frequently run concurrently with production preparation rather than before it. Neither of these costs reliably surface in project post-mortems, but both are real and both are largely avoidable