A simple guide to understanding IoT Product Development lifecycle

IoT has been taking over the field of technology for quite some time starting with smart home automation to industrial automation. According to Statista, there are around 21.5 billion IoT devices across the world. Developing such IoT products and services might sometimes be challenging provided that a company is focusing on all aspects of the development process on the go. Planning on the go leads to various factors that would affect the project and eventually the development process, ROI, etc.

Before commencing any IoT project, it is important to plan out the entire development process right from where you need to begin and how you are going to deploy the project. Planning out the development process would prevent a lot of time, money and efforts that are invested in developing a faulty project. This will also give you clarity in understanding the budget and the requirements. Below are the 6 stages of IoT product development to guide you through the steps for developing a successful IoT product.

Stage – 1: Idea discovery and market definition 

Before you start thinking about an IoT project, it is advisable to research the market as thoroughly as possible. So that you can understand the drawbacks or issues with current technology and can find a product to improvise the existing version or a new product to address the issues. While the idea of the project can be simple, the concept has to be very clear and elaborate as to what issue it is going to address and the field it focuses on, like logistics, medicine, automobile, etc.

While defining a market carefully analyze the market to find answers to who will be using your product, the purpose of your product, the target audience, their age, gender, the issue that your product will address and how will it be welcomed and used among your selective group of target audience and finally, whether if it is really needed for the market at the moment.

Analyzing these factors will help you identify potential competitors and collaborators and will provide an idea of how much the market is willing to pay for your product. With these things, you can validate if this project is really worth pursuing.

Stage – 2: Research and development

After successfully analyzing the market and finding your potential customer, it is important to analyze different approaches to developing the product in a cost-effective way. The design and development process involves several steps to improve the chances of success of your product. The first and most important step is to know the product requirements and the resources needed to develop the proof of concept (POC).

The usage of IoT components varies with the use cases. While selecting the components it is important to first understand the role and characteristics of IoT devices in the product such as bandwidth, range, power consumption and node of the protocols. Various protocols of IoT devices include data link protocol (IEEE 802.15.4e, Z-wave, Bluetooth Low Energy, etc), Network layer protocol (RPL, CORPL, CARP), Encapsulation Protocol (LoWPAN, 6Lo, etc), Session Layer Protocol (MQTT, SMQTT, DDS, etc) and Security Protocols (6LoWPAN, RPL, Application Layer).

POC can be used for market research and concept refinement. The next step is to hire teams across various disciplines such as embedded systems engineering, hardware development, PCB designing, mechanical engineering, UX/UI designing, application development, etc. Hiring potential experts across the above-mentioned disciplines play an important role in developing a successful product. If your company does not have the required team/teams, you can always outsource product development services from various companies.

Identifying a potential development partner to suit your business needs can often be quite difficult. There are many IoT marketplaces available in the market these days that can help you with finding the right product development companies. For instance, Ioterra is a B2B IoT marketplace that helps you find a development partner who could meet the requirements of developing your product. Based on the information you provide on the Ioterra RFP tool, their algorithm provides you a list of potential vendors, from which you can select one company to partner up with.

Stage – 3: Regulatory checks

Regulator checks are an important part of the IoT product designing stage. Regulatory requirements and certifications like FCC, CE, BIS, UL, etc must be considered while selecting the IoT components. The components have to be tested for emission and susceptibility. Additionally, network providers must perform tests to certify the product to be eligible for deployment in their infrastructure. This process is very costly as the implementation of cellular services differs with different cases. Hence it is important to select pre-certified components as it greatly reduces the cost and time for implementation.

Pre-certified parts can be comparatively expensive than non-certified parts. But it helps in reducing the barriers in the development cycle in the long run during implementation stages. The only concern with pre-certified components is that size of the module can be an issue when it comes to highly dense devices. In this case, the cost involved and the during of development would be higher and lengthy respectively.

Stage – 4: Implementation

While Proof of Concept proves the idea of the project, the points gathered while building a POC and market feedback take a lot of time to be implemented into an actual product. This implementation phase is where the software and hardware development concepts are put into practice to develop a project.

The first step in the implementation phase is the development of a manufacturable PCB. Generally, these PCBs can be classified into alpha and beta prototypes wherein the hardware components and production-level designs are implemented respectively. Following this step, the embedded system developers will add new features to the product to improve its quality by carrying out various processes like integration testing, fault detection, continuous integration, etc.

After the main product is developed and tested it is finally ready for commercialization. Before initially launching the product out to the market, consider launching a prototype with the most used features. This will help in generating cash flow that can be used in developing user-preferred features in the main product.

Stage – 5 Manufacturing

IoT product manufacturing can be in low, medium or high volumes depending on factors such as market needs, target customers and maybe even funding. Most startups and SMEs spend a lot of time and resources in finding the right contract manufacturers (CM) who can handle end-to-end development rather than selecting the product designer. Sometimes the CMs include product designers also in their development teams under subsidized costs for startups and SMEs. In most cases, CMs do this to have complete control over the project. While they have all the necessary talents, there are still possibilities for the product to not have the desired outcome. This would greatly affect the company’s reputation at the most of burning resources. Hence it is important to select the right development team with whom you can partner up and be as must involved in the development process as possible.

Stage – 6: Product launch 

Developing and deploying an IoT product is often quite challenging as mentioned earlier. Outsourcing the development partner even for a part of the development process can make the whole process easy. Most end-to-end development partners take care of all these development processes for you and even provide necessary support post-deployment. It is essential to know that if your product is hardware-based and you have outsourced hardware development services, depending on the required components, the hardware development partner would need 90-day prior notice to gather the required items and prepare the manufacturing line.

The development process usually takes a while but there are ways to increase your project lifecycle management process. Effective communication between the teams, quality and accuracy of data gathered and the flexibility of the solution are the three most important factors to improve your product lifecycle management productivity. IoT product development lifecycle is almost similar to any product development lifecycle. When carried out properly with the right tools, the product development will be successful.