Internet of Things: The Hardest Products To Create

Internet of Things (IoT) products may be the hardest products to create.

Amazon Echos, Nest thermostats, Peloton bikes, and other widely familiar IoT products provide seamless user experiences from unboxing to use. Turn them on, connect them to a Wi-Fi network, setup a profile, and you are up and running. What users don’t see, and what makes IoT products so challenging to create and to provide ease of use, is all of the things that are going on behind the scenes.

Successful IoT products have to be world-class physical, data, and software products. If any one area of the product isn’t world-class, the product is likely to be unsuccessful. It is hard enough to create a world-class product in any of these individual areas, let alone a single product that is world-class in all three.

Creating an IoT product that is world-class requires a multitude of different, experienced craftspeople in product, data, and software. This means industrial/physical product designers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, firmware engineers, fabricators, manufacturers, and more for the physical product. The data aspect requires data architects, data engineers, data storage, data science, and data analytics experts. The software component requires digital designers, software architects, software engineers, and DevOps professionals. In order to tie everything together, an IoT product needs product management, which requires documentation, testing, packaging, legal, marketing, and more. Whew. And this is only a partial list of the team members across many different disciplines that would be needed.

The business model behind IoT products is often more complicated than a business model for a non-connected physical product, a data product, or a software product. What do you monetize with an IoT product? The physical product, the data, the software, or a combination? Maybe an IoT product doesn’t get monetized directly. Many IoT products now get created and exist to facilitate another aspect of a business, process, or product that benefits greatly as a result of an IoT aspect of the product. Sensors used by the manufacturer of a product to help them know how the product is being used and when service might be needed can be of immense value. The value to the manufacturer may far outweigh…