Five years ago, Michael Corr faced a dilemma familiar to many category creators: his customers were demanding features he knew shouldn’t exist. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, the Duro Labs founder shared how rejecting “the way it’s always been done” became key to transforming product lifecycle management (PLM) – but only after figuring out which legacy features to keep.
The Legacy Feature Trap
“I can’t tell you how many calls I had with prospective customers who were yelling at me that what we were providing was not a true PLM, because we didn’t have these buttons or these processes that they had been using for 30 years,” Michael recalls. This resistance wasn’t just about features – it represented a deeper attachment to outdated workflows that were holding the entire industry back.
Why Hardware Stayed Stagnant
The hardware industry’s resistance to change wasn’t accidental. “The hardware industry has actually been pretty stagnant for the last 20 years in terms of innovation and new models for designing and manufacturing products,” Michael explains. “It’s been leveraging a lot of the same workflows and software tools and data models that were established and never really evolved.”
This stagnation was reinforced by team structures and tools that encouraged siloed thinking: “You have electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, operations, procurement. You have manufacturing, you have logistics. And in the most common scenarios, each of those teams, most of them are not even on the same company umbrella.”
The Cultural Shift That Made Innovation Possible
The breakthrough came from an unexpected source – software companies entering the hardware space. “You’re seeing that culturally, some of the best hardware products are now being developed by software companies where not the Apples or the Samsung, but companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon who are originally software companies are now developing very impressive and very formidable hardware products,” Michael notes.
These companies brought fresh perspectives and new expectations: “You’re starting to see that software centric culture of your workflows and agile workflows and get flow coming into the hardware space.”
A Framework for Feature Decisions
Duro’s experience offers a framework for founders deciding which legacy features to maintain versus eliminate:
- Identify True Value vs. Historical Accident “Not everything is inefficient or inappropriate, but there are many things that are,” Michael explains. The key is determining which features solve real problems versus those that exist due to historical limitations.
- Support the Transition Period “We have to be able to support both for a certain amount of time,” Michael notes about balancing legacy and innovative approaches. This isn’t just about features – it’s about helping customers transition to new workflows.
- Focus on Data Over Interface Rather than replicating old interfaces, focus on the underlying data needs. As Michael explains, “If the data going into the ecosystem is erroneous or incomplete, then most certainly the data coming out isn’t going to be any better.”
- Look for Cultural Indicators The success of new approaches often depends on cultural readiness. “There’s a cultural shift. And so now there’s a new generation of engineers who fundamentally understand that model. It’s not foreign to them. And so they’re not only embracing it, but they’re demanding it,” Michael observes.
The Future of Category Innovation
For founders challenging category conventions, Michael’s vision offers inspiration: “What I’m looking forward to is the day that a hardware team is stood up and the very first thing they do is install their Dura account.”
This represents more than just product adoption – it’s about fundamentally changing how an industry works. The key insight for founders is that successful category creation isn’t just about building new features – it’s about identifying which legacy features are holding back progress and having the conviction to eliminate them, even when customers initially resist.
The hardware industry’s transformation suggests that timing is crucial. When cultural shifts align with technological capability, that’s when revolutionary change becomes possible. For founders building in established categories, the question isn’t just “what should we build?” but “what should we deliberately leave behind?”
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