CAD ROOMS in Design News: Why Hardware Engineers Need Their Hybrid Work Revolution

When it comes to engineering and design media, Design News is one of the names our team respects most. For decades it has been a trusted voice in the design-engineering world, read by the mechanical, electrical, and systems engineers who design real, physical products for a living.

What we admire about Design News is its technical credibility. This isn't surface-level tech coverage — it goes deep on design software, embedded systems, automation, materials, and the day-to-day realities of bringing hardware to life. As part of Informa's engineering media portfolio (the same group behind events like MD&M and DesignCon), it reaches exactly the audience we build for: engineers who care less about hype and more about how the work actually gets done. When Design News publishes something, serious engineers read it.

That's why we were genuinely proud that our CEO, Christina Rebel, was invited to contribute a thought leadership piece to Design News: "Hardware Engineers Are Long Overdue Their Hybrid Work Revolution." Being featured in a channel of this caliber reflects the kind of conversations we want to be part of as the industry rethinks how engineering teams collaborate.

Christina's piece tackles a gap she has seen up close: when the world went remote in 2020, software engineers barely missed a beat — but hardware engineers were left stranded by tools built for the in-office era. Six years on, most hardware teams are still fighting huge CAD files over VPN, "final_v3_REALLY_FINAL" version chaos, expensive review licenses, and design decisions lost in email threads. Her argument: cloud-based PDM is the "GitHub moment" for hardware — and teams like the Boston University Rocket Propulsion Group are already proving what's possible.

It's a candid, well-argued read on why the hybrid-work revolution doesn't have to leave hardware engineers behind — and what engineering leaders can do about it today.

At CAD ROOMS, this is exactly the problem we're working to solve: making hardware collaboration as simple, accessible, and distributed as software collaboration has become.

👉 Read Christina's full article on Design News: Hardware Engineers Are Long Overdue Their Hybrid Work Revolution