IOT Product Management | Critical Success Factors

Its been over a month, since I had joined KritiLabs. The learning has been very steep and intense, considering its a career shift for me from a services based pre-sales to a product based pre-sales and product management. KritiLabs' core proposition is to help solve some of the real world Remote Asset Management problems using IOT. As part of my initial 30 days to further understand their DNA, I was involved in understanding the products, the people & teams behind it, the customers we work with.

Below is my perspective, based on what I had learned till date, on what is essential to make a hardware product succeed for mass adoption in industries which are still following decades old systems and processes:

• User Empowerment: With IOT, it is very easy to reduce the user involvement within a process to a zero. This would make these users feel demotivated, as they are no longer empowered to take decisions as part of the process, resulting in lower adoption of these devices in such an industry or a business process. In such situations it is always prudent to empower the users to take decisions or operate these devices based on the information the device provides to these users, while logging their activities as part of audit trail.
• User feedback: Regular user feedback is essential to help improve the product not only from improving the product's experience but also for product iterations which can solve additional use cases within the same business process
• Better design & integration testing of hardware: Unlike software products, where certain features of the product can be rolled back, issues related directly to the firmware and hardware are not that easy to be solved through a simple update. It’s actually a better strategy to invest more in the design and test phase for better integration of the hardware & software as well as ensuring no issues related to hardware creep in production
• Pilots: One of the corner stones for success for a product when newly introduced is beta phase or a pilot phase. Especially with regards to hardware, the chances of it failing outside of a controlled environment is way higher. In our pilots at KritiLabs we have seen multiple points of failure right from the vagaries of nature to human ingenuity to ensure the product fails in meeting its objectives. Success of the pilot doesnt hinge on the success / failure of the product during pilot, but amount of feedback and data it can collect during the pilot. This data and feedback must be fed back to product / solution development

These are the key things, when done right can help improve mass adoption of IOT devices in areas which still follow processes and systems which are decades old