Matthias Wagner asked an Apple engineer about managing the iPhone supply chain.
“What software do you use?”
“What software? Cubicles full of people. Each one has a phone and a list of numbers. They call suppliers all day, updating a shared spreadsheet. One person can edit at a time.”
That’s the terrain. Not what the frameworks say. Not what the business models teach. The actual terrain.
Summer 2019, Matthias left Facebook to build electronics in his Oakland workshop. Got frustrated immediately.
The tools hadn’t evolved since the mid-nineties. No version control, no collaboration, no automation. Just paper processes ported to Windows.
The map said hardware was hard because manufacturing was expensive and inaccessible.
He tested it. Ordered any semiconductor in the world to his backyard. Unit quantity: one. Seven-day turnaround from China. A few hundred dollars.
The supply chain had democratized completely. The design tools hadn’t budged.
At Facebook, machine learning had transformed everything. Why not here?
A friend told him, “Matthias, you’ve been complaining about this all summer. Do something about it.”
That’s Flux.ai. Making hardware design as accessible as software development.
But here’s the pattern: most builders read the map and execute. Matthias walks the terrain and observes.
The anecdotes don’t match the data. The frameworks don’t capture the friction. The best practices miss the opportunities.
He doesn’t trust what frameworks say should be true. He tests what is actually true. Sources information directly. Builds messy models. Notices the friction everyone accepts as baseline.
The map said hardware required massive capital and factory connections. The terrain showed the real constraint was tools nobody had fixed in thirty years.
That gap between map and terrain? That’s where opportunities hide.
Most product strategy happens in conference rooms. You fill out canvases and positioning statements. Run the plays from the playbook. But you’re optimizing against a map, not reality.
The reality is cubicles and phone calls managing materials for the iPhone. The reality is CAD software that looks identical to 1995. The reality is sourcing spreadsheets with single-user edit locks in 2025.
These aren’t exceptions. This is how things actually work.
You can’t spot that from the map. You have to walk the terrain. Get your hands dirty. Build something yourself. Ask the engineer doing the work how they actually do it.
Test your assumptions with first-hand experience. That’s how you develop real product sense. That’s how you see opportunities others miss by trusting frameworks that describe a world that doesn’t exist.
The map is where you start. The terrain is where you build.
Listen on Apple Podcasts ↗ or Spotify ↗
Guest: Matthias Wagner
LinkedIn: Matthias Wagner ↗
Company: Flux.ai ↗
