How to create an IoT product?
As a system designer you need to create some basic and simple applications using off the shelf hardware and software and then build from there. There are many factors that the system designer needs to consider like: Installation, provisioning, whitelisting, security, power, dashboards, usability, etc...
Someone is going to have to develop the software to add the application logic and algorithm to solve the problem. Spending time and trying to find a perfect “off the shelf” platform might be much more harder than developing the solution in house. The off the shelf products are generally designed to appeal to a wide range of users, and lack many features which could be a differentiator in a competitive market.
Therefore, it is absolutely critical to have the right skill set in your team, and all team members must understand the ultimate design and see the bigger picture. The team members must clearly understand the impact of their work and embrace changes which are introduced as a result of customer feedback or logic/algorithm improvements.
Selecting hardware for your IoT project
When developing a new IoT product, the cost and time are very important drivers. Designing and building hardware and focusing on cost may lead to precious time and resources being wasted and lost opportunities.
Optimizing hardware and connectivity for cost is difficult and very time consuming and requires out of the box solutions and thinking strategy.
A good approach is to accept the initial high cost of prototype development in favour of saving time and time to market.
The system designer can start to build minimum viable prototypes, this will help iron out the kinks of the business case and gather real data from the field. Once the prototypes are deployed in the field, the designer can spend time to fine tune the solution for cost saving and to improve the reliability of the product.
There is a great amount of learning that will happen once the product gets in front of the customers, sales team and support teams.
Undoubtedly, there will be many issues and shortcoming that will appear after the product is used in the field. These issues can provide valuable data and help the developers to tweak the system and improve the quality.
It is very important for the designer to build mechanism into the product in order to allow changes to be made remotely, such as remote firmware upgrade or replacing part of the system without making changes to the entire system.
This can be a very challenging task when developing a hardware solution. Nevertheless, this is absolutely critical to have this mechanism in place as this provide many cost saving benefits.
Importance of feedback mechanism.
The system designer must incorporate customer feedback mechanism to allow easy communication between stakeholders and collect customer’s feedback. The sales, marketing and support team need to communicate the customer’s feedback to the developer as this feedback will be extremely valuable in shaping the product and avoiding failures.
Another critical component of the IoT product design is timing. Timing is everything, anything which delays or unnecessarily complicates implementing the feedback cycle will slow the development and getting the product to market and the opportunities will be lost.
Therefore it is absolutely critical to have a well developed feedback cycle mechanism and avoid failure of the product.