TheRoad
Product Strategy. Hands-on Consulting.
Smart Tangibles
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, this book shows how mastering connected physical products is no longer just an operational challenge - it’s the next frontier for business success across the manufacturing sector, and beyond.
Table Of Contents
A work in progress...
I. 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, or even mature companies.
II. Hardware Startups - Validation Traps
The hidden traps in hardware user testing and how to validate demand before you commit to tooling and production.
III. Digital interfaces - A Game Changer for Hardware
How digital touch-points and over-the-air updates unlock flexibility in smart hardware, creating growth opportunities, and inherent advantages.
IV. Product Managers in the Hardware Industry
The evolving role of product managers in driving successful software-hardware integration.
V. Physical Products: Early validation is key
Why thoughtful risk mitigation starts with user insight, not engineering specs.
VI. Physical Products: Validated Ideation
The case of concept cars as they evolve from fantastical to realistic during the validation process.
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.
VIII. The importance of timely validation
Physical product validation is crucial due to the high costs and inflexibility of hardware development.
IX. The Machine that goes PING
Communicating Product Value for Black Boxes
X. The Inherent Advantages of Software
How software features outcompete stand-alone hardware products
XI. The power of lean hardware product management
A case study exploring advantage of rapid manufacturing
XII. Reviving iRobot
A Case study exploring the potential impact of a marketplace built around a physical product.
XIII. Smart AND Secured? Think Again
Considering the inherent risks in connected products
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.