Q&A: Hardware development, collaboration, documentation

As engineers ourselves, we built AllSpice to be a platform that helps engineers create incredible hardware products more efficiently. We love talking with our users, and we're so happy you're talking back to us 🙂. Here’s a recap of a live Q&A about hardware product development, collaboration, and documentation.

AllSpice.io team
January 5, 2026

Let’s recap

For the live Q&A, we teamed up with Kaethe Henning from Alloy Product Development to have a conversation about collaboration in hardware development (try saying that three times fast). We kept the session small and cozy so we could answer everyone’s questions — and we sure had plenty of them to answer 🙌

We covered a lot (stay tuned for Q&A clips popping up on our LinkedIn soon 👀

) but just to give you a taste, here’s what our topics included:

  • An overview of the basic development stages across HW companies, the common pitfalls at each stage, and solutions to avoid them
  • When to design in-house vs. outsourcing to a development firm
  • Our favorite collaboration tools for HW teams
  • Why documentation is important and some best practices
  • Hot trends in HW development we’re excited about 🔥
  • Software practices we see commonly used in HW

Want to see more? Watch the full Q&A video below or on our YouTube channel.

As always, happy developing – and we hope to see you at our next event!

Do you have any specific questions you’d like covered in our future live Q&A sessions? Let us know at info@allspice.io.

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Kyle Dumont

Co-Founder & CTO

Kyle Dumont is an Electrical Engineer, the Co-Founder and CTO of AllSpice.io. He has a background in electrical engineering product design, having taken products from concept to mass-manufacturing at iRobot and Voxel8. He specialized in hardware system integration and sensor design, holding 5 patents in these areas. Kyle received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University, as well as an MS in Engineering with a focus on Computer Engineering and Machine Learning and an MBA from Harvard.

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Valentina Ratner

Co-Founder & CEO

Valentina Ratner is Co-Founder and CEO of AllSpice.io, a collaboration platform for teams developing hardware. Prior to launching AllSpice out of graduate school, she worked at Amazon as a PM, managing infrastructure projects and internal productivity tools.Valentina holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Boston University, an M.S. in Engineering (Computer Science), and an MBA from Harvard. Born and raised in Argentina, she now lives in San Francisco with both her husband and miniature schnauzer Fritz.