Build competitive advantage with connected product engineering

Connected products are all around us. What were once seen as interesting experiments are now everyday realities delivering tangible value for makers and users.

Medical devices now help people monitor and manage their health at home, improving quality of life and patient outcomes. Connected cars make mobility experiences more enjoyable, seamless and sustainable. Manufacturing and industrial equipment operates more safely and efficiently, protecting workers and streamlining workflows.

However, as more organizations add digital capabilities to physical products, differentiation becomes critical for gaining market share. There’s immense pressure to innovate faster, deliver superior customer experiences and rethink business models to create smarter, more connected products than the competition.

Customer experience is the key here. To succeed, organizations must solve real customer problems and deliver compelling digital experiences across the extended lifespan of connected physical products.

This demands:

• A clear understanding of user pain points, goals and other requirements.

• The ability to determine market fit and delivery viability.

• A combination of physical and digital engineering expertise.

But few organizations possess such a broad range of skills and insights, which makes it challenging to create differentiated, smart connected products that deliver meaningful short- and long-term value.

Challenges in building connected products 

There’s increasing pressure to innovate at speed, but many organizations find their ability to create effective connected products is impeded by several common challenges:

• Slow innovation cycles: Staying competitive requires the ability to rapidly conceive, build and launch differentiated products and features. However, accumulated technical debt, long development cycles and complex integration issues often hamper organizations’ ability to get innovative products and features to market.

• Skills gaps: It’s difficult for physical product makers to attract and retain specialized engineering talent proficient in emerging technologies and complex system integration. In industries like automotive, where software quality increasingly drives the overall user experience, these skills are essential. And for organizations that need to integrate products into larger, cloud-based ecosystems, specialist skills are even more important.

• Security, privacy and compliance concerns: Connected products often gather and process sensitive customer information, so strong data stewardship is vital. But compliance with evolving data privacy regulations — and staying ahead of emerging cyber threats — can be extremely difficult to manage and address.

These challenges can cause organizations to stall in their efforts to innovate — or worse, release substandard products too quickly. The results are limited functionality, poor user experiences and security flaws, leading to increased customer churn, loss of market share and missed growth opportunities.

In response to this convergence of challenges, many organizations are turning to connected product engineering services for help.

How connected product engineering solves innovation gaps

Organizations are using connected product engineering services to close the skills gap, accelerate time-to-market and deliver superior customer experiences. It’s a growing trend that’s helping organizations navigate the complexity of adding digital capabilities to physical products while accounting for security, maintenance and sustainability across a product’s extended lifespan.

Connected product engineering has now emerged as a discipline in its own right. It covers the entire process of designing, developing, testing and managing products that are specifically engineered to connect and communicate with other devices or systems.

This discipline integrates hardware, software, and advanced connectivity and AI technologies to create smart products that offer compelling user experiences. It spans the entire product lifecycle — from ideation to end-of-life — to ensure connected products continue delivering outstanding experiences as market dynamics, customer needs and digital capabilities evolve.

For example, connected product engineering can involve:

• Validating ideas for product market fit  and alignment with business goals.

• Combining AI and connectivity technologies to enhance functionality.

• Performance engineering to increase software reliability and improve user experiences.

• Using DevOps and agile methodologies to iterate rapidly and accelerate time-to-market.

• Adopting a Secure by design approach to make products secure and assure continuous compliance.

Real-world example: Connected product engineering in automotive

One great example of the power of connected product engineering is our longstanding work with a leading luxury automotive manufacturer.

Part of our ongoing partnership has been focused on enhancing the performance and reliability of the software that powers its in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems. This software is vital for delivering the premium mobility experiences the company’s customers expect.

To accomplish this, Thoughtworks applied performance engineering principles and practices to:

• Build a toolset for continuously collecting and evaluating performance and reliability metrics, and integrating the data into the R&D workflow.

• Optimize the IVI user experience by using tracing, sampling and analysis to improve startup speed, running speed and fluency, while reducing errors and crashes.

• Solidify relevant analysis and optimization approaches into patterns, methods and automated use cases, enabling the company to continue improving its software in the future.

We’re also helping the company develop its own operating system, which will be the basis for a standard interface for all customer experience features in its future vehicles. Applying DevOps practices has accelerated feedback cycles, supporting faster iteration and shorter time-to-market. AI-powered root cause analysis has also increased development and bug-fix efficiency by 30%, accelerating the project even further.

Partner with connected product experts to accelerate innovation 

Thoughtworks helps organizations in a variety of industries conceive, design, develop, launch and manage smart connected products that deliver compelling customer experiences, createl competitive advantage and open up new revenue streams.

Our combination of expertise in engineering, product design and development, and business strategy means we can see the big picture to ensure we build the right products, the right way. 

By applying our accumulated knowledge from numerous connected products sectors, we don’t have to start from zero on each client project. And our partnerships with leading vendors across the connected products landscape mean we can bring in the right combination of competencies for each client engagement.

To learn more about how we can help you accelerate innovation and create differentiated, smart connected products, get in touch with our experts.