Nexaform's second hardware lab opened this month in Saint Paul, about four miles from the Theodore Wirth Parkway building. It is 9,000 square feet, it has its own bench space, environmental chambers, and a small production line, and it is staffed by 22 people.

We had the option of putting it on the empty third floor of the existing building, which would have been cheaper and considerably less trouble.

Why not one floor up

Because the two buildings are for different things, and co-locating them would have quietly made them the same thing.

Theodore Wirth is where new work happens: early prototypes, things that do not work yet, the anechoic chamber, and the mess that goes with all of it. It runs on the assumption that anything might change tomorrow.

Saint Paul is the opposite. It is for devices that have stopped changing: pilot production, sustaining engineering, validation runs, and the long unglamorous work of keeping shipping products correct. It runs on the assumption that nothing changes without a reason and a record.

Those are genuinely different working cultures, and in our experience one floor of separation is not enough to keep them from bleeding into each other. Either sustaining work gets interrupted by whatever is exciting downstairs, or the prototype teams start inheriting process weight they do not need yet. Four miles is enough friction to keep them distinct and not enough to stop anyone driving over.

What is in each building

  • Theodore Wirth Parkway: research, early hardware, firmware, data science, the anechoic chamber, and the environmental chambers used for exploratory work.
  • Saint Paul: pilot production, sustaining engineering, validation and verification, calibration, failure analysis, and returns.

Failure analysis moving to Saint Paul is the change that will matter most internally. Returned units used to arrive at the same building where new devices were being designed, which sounds like a virtuous feedback loop and in practice meant they queued behind whatever was more interesting. They now go somewhere whose job is to look at them.

Hiring

Fourteen of the 22 roles are filled. We are still hiring test engineers, a calibration technician, and a failure analysis engineer, all Saint Paul based, all on site rather than remote, because the work involves physical objects.