Smart Tangibles

Yoel Frischoff
Apr 28
4 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

Physical Products That Unlock Competitive Advantage

An Upcoming Book.

Turning Smart Tangibles into Strategic Advantage

Smart Tangibles explores the critical shift taking place as connected, learning, and adaptive physical products reshape user flows, raise consumer expectations, and build competitive advantage over traditional, non-responsive alternatives.

Drawing from systems thinking, design intelligence, and real-world strategy, this book offers a new playbook for product managers, founders, and innovators tasked with leading products that are no longer simply built—but grown, adapted, and sustained.

With clear frameworks, fresh insights, and a focus on creating enduring value, Smart Tangibles shows how mastering connected physical products is no longer just an operational challenge—it’s the next great frontier for business success across the manufacturing sector and beyond.

This is an evolving list... Why is Hardware THAT Hard?

Why hardware is so hard to get right—and why early-stage prototype validation can make or break your startup.

The unique challenges product leaders face with integrated hardware and software products. It emphasizes the importance of early validation to mitigate risks and the difficulties in creating meaningful MVPs due to the monolithic nature of hardware products.

II Hardware Startups - Validation Traps

The hidden traps in hardware user testing and how to validate demand before you commit to tooling and production.

Hardware startups face unique challenges, particularly in terms of timing and cost of failure. While software companies can test market adoption with MVPs, hardware ventures must invest heavily in production and distribution, making failure more costly. Despite these risks, hardware is essential for our physical world, and digital technologies can improve the fortunes of hardware startups.

III Digital interfaces - A Game Changer for Hardware

How digital touch-points and over-the-air updates unlock flexibility in smart hardware.

Digital interfaces, evolving from simple dials and gauges to sophisticated touchscreens and beyond, have revolutionized hardware products. They offer greater flexibility, enabling iterative design and software-defined interactions, while also facilitating over-the-air updates and remote monitoring. As technology advances, the fusion of multi-modal input methods and communication protocols will further transform the user experience, blurring the lines between hardware and software.

IV Product Managers in the Hardware Industry

The evolving role of product managers in driving successful software-hardware integration.

The rise of digital user experience and interfaces in hardware products, particularly in the automotive industry, necessitates a shift in product management practices. This involves a focus on software-driven interface design, continuous customer feedback, and post-launch improvement, similar to software product management. Product managers in the physical world face challenges like validation, which involves market research, user testing, and data analysis to ensure product success.

V Physical Products: Early validation is key

Why thoughtful risk mitigation starts with user insight, not engineering specs.

Early validation is crucial for physical products due to the high investment required prior to launch. A cautionary tale highlights the importance of considering user willingness to pay, alternative costs, and market trends, and stresses the need for early validation to protect against startup killer mistakes.

VI Physical Products: Validated Ideation

The case of concept cars as they evolve from fantastical to realistic during the validation process. Manufacturers use these evolving designs to test market acceptance and refine features, balancing imagination with practicality and risk. Autonomous vehicle concepts illustrates this process, with technology and user needs shaping the final product.

VII When Service Evolves Into Relationship

Connected hardware products offer vendors the opportunity to provide enduring value to users through firmware updates and services, creating lasting relationships and increase life time revenue. This shift in business model, exemplified by companies like Tesla and Apple, enables vendors to generate significant revenue from services and user engagement. Product management plays a crucial role in identifying and capitalizing on these opportunities for product innovation and user-centric development.

VIII The importance of timely validation

Physical product validation is crucial due to the high costs and inflexibility of hardware development. Market need and positioning analysis are essential, followed by feature validation through mockups, prototypes, and user testing. This process helps identify and prioritize features, ensuring the product meets user needs and aligns with market demands.

IX The Machine that goes PING - Communicating Product Value for Black Boxes

Black box products, which lack visible feedback, can alienate users and make them doubt their value. To address this, product managers should incorporate indicators like status LEDs and reset buttons, providing users with reassurance that the product is functioning properly. These simple features can significantly enhance user experience and build trust in the product’s reliability.

X The Inherent Advantage of Flexible Software

Durable goods (AKA physical products) leaders must carefully evaluate competitive landscape, especially when existing software-based solutions exist. Software features, easy to implement and distribute at negligible cost, tend to render most standalone devices obsolete...

A cautionary tale.

XI The power of lean hardware product management

Ever found yourself wandering through Moma, a sleek audioguide pressed to your ear, telling you about the artwork you're standing in front of? Did you wonder how it knew exactly which masterpiece had caught your attention? Let me introduce you to the humble ceiling-mounted infrared beacon – possibly the most important museum innovation you've never noticed.

XII Reviving iRobot: Build a marketplace around your product

iRobot, the pioneer of robotic mopping, faces financial struggle due to competition. Amazon's failed acquisition left it short in cash. What if the way out of the downward spiral was in building a marketplace around iRobot-Home, its control app, offering a range of home maintenance services and generating additional revenue streams?

XIII Smart and Secured? Think Again.

Security is when governments usually help you to protect, whereas when it comes to Privacy... Your mileage may vary. How smart tangibles are susceptible to both edges of this blade, is yet to be fully understood, as this stands at the core of differentiation for companies like Apple, and conversely, weaponized - rightfully or not - by governments in their trade wars.

XIV Ai and Smart Tangibles - A Match Made in Heaven

As smart tangibles send up the ether terabytes upon terabytes of usage data, vendors pouring over it use it to improve performance, increase user value, and identify revenue opportunities.

While product analytics methodology is a well developed in the realm of 'pure' software - over web and mobile devices, the introduction of physical environment changes what can be monitored, and what insights can be explored.