Notes from the Road — IoT & Smart Product Insights

Beyond the Device: IoT Ecosystems

Selling a connected product means committing to operate it for years. Someone has to ship updates, pay the cloud bills, patch vulnerabilities, monitor the fleet...

Tangible Companion Site: Case study submissions are ON

The Tangibles Product Manager

The tangibles PM isn't a software PM who learned hardware, or a hardware PM who learned software. It's a distinct smart product role — wider in scope, split acr...

Reviving iRobot: Build a Marketplace

Strategic turnaround vision: how struggling hardware companies can reinvent themselves through platform thinking, ecosystem development, and marketplace busines...

Product Valhalla

How tangibles transform from one-time transactions into ongoing relationships through service layers, creating customer value and competitive moats beyond the i...

Electrum: Toolkit for Software-Embedded Hardware

You have a product idea. It includes a microcontroller, a couple of sensors, and maybe an app. You can picture it working. But can you describe the firmware upd...

Business Model Essentials

Revenue model evolution from one-time sales to recurring services, subscription strategies for hardware companies, and creating sustainable value streams throug...

Societal Threats

Connected products quietly widen societal gaps — through cost barriers, digital literacy demands, and accessibility blind spots — while governments wield cybers...

What I Learned at IoT Tech Expo Global 2026

I spent two days at Olympia London last week, wandering the halls of IoT Tech Expo Global 2026. After 25 years in product strategy, I've developed a filter for ...

Connected AND Secured? Think Again

Connected products run software across layers of silicon, firmware, radios, buses, sensors, cloud APIs, companion apps, and a supply chain of third-party compon...

The Swatch Moment

When a killer feature hits your category, you can deny, retreat, or reinvent. How Swatch's smart product strategy survived disruption once — and whether it can ...

Killer Features

Disproportionate reward is reserved for rule-bending product attributes — features that redraw competition lines and reshape hardware product strategy....

First Impressions

The importance of initial user experience in hardware products, design psychology, and how physical product interactions shape lasting brand perceptions and ado...

IoT Tech Expo Global 2026: Speaker Picks

Event Details: February 4-5, 2026 at Olympia, London. Conference agenda built around priorities shaping enterprise technology in 2026....

The Right to Compete

Competitive positioning tools that help hardware teams identify defensible market gaps, filter features against the position they're claiming, and kill products...

Lean Hardware: Reducing Iteration Pain

Lean hardware strategies that minimize waste, lower capital exposure, and shorten time to market – without sacrificing profitability....

The New MVP: Shipping Hardware Fast and Slow

As customer value shifts from hardware to digital layers, new opportunities emerge for fast iteration and user feedback. While hardware remains monolithic and s...

Beyond Mockups: What to Build Before You Build

Hardware teams have four distinct validation instruments — proof of concept, mockup, prototype, and pre-production unit — each designed to answer a different qu...

Taming Concepts

Bridging the 'taste gap' between the market you design for and the one you launch into — how the auto industry uses motor shows as staged experiments, plus a th...

The Data Payload

This chapter examines what flows through the connectivity pipe — and where that processing runs: on the device, in the cloud, or at an emerging hub tier in betw...

The Connectivity Watershed

How connectivity transformed products from frozen, standalone devices into updatable, observable fleet members — tracing the firmware freeze from lithography to...

The Driving Force of Miniaturization

The four fronts of miniaturization — power, compute, connectivity, and manufacturing — that converge to unlock new IoT and smart product categories, plus the sc...

IKEA's Smart-Home Reboot

IKEA just announced a full smart-home reboot — 21 new Matter-based connected products launching in parallel. All redesigned, all cheaper, all built on an open m...

The Machine That Goes Ping

How smart products communicate value through design signals, interface cues, and user experience elements — building trust and conveying advanced hardware capab...

Digital Interfaces

How digital interfaces have reshaped hardware products, from simple dials to advanced touchscreens, enabling software-defined interactions and over-the-air upda...

Evolving Competition

Traditional sources of hardware advantage — patents, supplier relationships, manufacturing scale — erode faster than most incumbents realize. This chapter maps ...

Killer Features - Disruption at Play

What is a killer feature? The phrase surfaced in the 1980s with VisiCalc — the single reason to buy an Apple II. A look at disruption mechanics in hardware and ...

When Gadgets Dissolve Into Features

Cameras, GPS units, music players, voice recorders — the smartphone folded them all into app icons. How this convergence pattern reshapes IoT product strategy a...

Hardware Startup Validation Traps

Hardware startups often fall into validation traps that would be merely expensive in software but prove catastrophic when atoms are involved. The lean startup m...

Why is Hardware THAT hard?

While software developers can push updates to fix bugs and add features within hours, hardware teams find themselves trapped in an unforgiving predicament: ever...

Hardware Needs Digital Augmentation, Now

While traditional hardware processes rely on systems engineering to master physical constraints and technical tradeoffs, that discipline often sits at a distanc...

The Importance of First Impressions

You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Why hardware product launches matter for demand generation — and how the theater of innovation shapes ...

Recurring Revenue to Customer Loyalty

Winning the Long Game with Smart Products. Consider any durable good: A chair, a TV, a car, a mobile phone. A common trait is implied from the very name: They'r...

IoT Tech Expo Europe

Attending. Meet Me There. Would you like to discuss product initiatives in the IoT, Industry 4.0, Smart hardware space?...

NPV: Profitability Assessment, Done Right

Net present value applied to smart hardware product investment — a practical NPV walkthrough showing how to assess profitability across uncertain timelines and ...

The Cost of Capital

Time value and risk premium — the two dimensions that shape a hardware product's true profit potential. How to factor cost of capital into smart product investm...

Contribution Margin and Break Even Quantities

Core financial concepts for hardware product strategy — contribution margin and break-even quantity, the tools that test whether a smart product idea can become...

Smart Business Models for Smart Tangibles

How connected hardware combines design, technology, and services into business models competitors can't easily copy — the smart business model framework from Ta...

Your LinkedIn Post Sucks. Mine Might Too.

The LinkedIn feed is broken — clogged with self-congratulatory fluff, AI-generated nothingness, and 'thought leadership' that's anything but. Bad for users, mar...

The Questions Hardware PMs Forget to Ask

You have a smart product idea — a microcontroller, a couple of sensors, maybe an app. But can you describe the firmware update mechanism? The power budget under...

Interoperability Wins!

As industries undergo digital transformation, collaborative data environments are becoming the backbone of modern workflows. For smart product vendors, the data...

The New Rules of Hardware Competition

Competitive dynamics facing hardware product innovators — once you achieve product-market fit in a blue ocean, competitors encircle fast. How smart product stra...

How to Turn Around Your Product in 90 Days

EyeClick needed a new offering for the K12 educational market. The full case study — smart product strategy, roadmap, multi-platform launch, content operations,...

Product Consulting Role at Versatile

Announcing a new product strategy consulting role at Versatile — bringing data-driven, AI- and machine-vision-powered smart products to the construction industr...

Waze: New Advertising Monetization Strategies

Can Waze grow advertising monetization through segmentation and attribution? A product strategy take on result-based ads (CPS), behavioral targeting, and Google...

Going Global: Product Due Diligence

A private equity firm asked me to assess an acquisition target — could a local loyalty solution scale globally? Inside a smart product due diligence: technology...

Can AI Scale as a Business?

Can AI scale as a business? Machine learning is built for compute scale — but the unit economics tell a different story for AI-driven smart product strategy....

Generative AI Big Bang

An explosion of generative AI across text, image, and video. What is OpenAI's play, and how does it reshape product strategy for software and connected hardware...

Fake It Till… Convicted

A tale of overzealous audacity and a vision turned sour — Theranos, hardware product strategy, and the line between visionary founder and outright fraud....

Is BNPL a Viable Lending Strategy?

Requested by a private equity fund investing in a customer loyalty platform — does the BNPL business model fit smart product growth? A look at when buy-now-pay-...

EyeWiz: Product Initiation and Launch

As EyeClick expanded into K12 education, the EyeWiz smart product platform was born — game console interface, content management system, and control app, all de...