Unveiling the Secrets of Product Strategy in the IoT Industry
Navigating the Intersection of Hardware and Software: Lessons from Tado's Dominik Busching
How do you navigate the intricate balance between the rapid-paced weekly sprints of agile software development and the long-term planning cycles inherent in hardware components?
How do you select strategic bets in a world where technological advancements and adoption rates can be unpredictable?
How do you validate your long-term ideas before building the hardware components?
In this episode, I spoke with Dominik Busching, Head of Product at Tado, and unveiled how they create innovative solutions that not only enhance user satisfaction but also contribute to the sustainable transformation of the energy industry.
Listen now on Apple, Spotify, Google, and YouTube, and read on for my takeaways and highlights of the episode.
My takeaways from this episode
When discussing how the strategy creation started, it was great to hear Dominik say this was “pushed” by a company transformation to interdisciplinary product teams, which led to engineers and designers being more involved in “product” and asking where they were heading.
Dominik had a typical scenario: the strategy was in the heads of the founders. But of course, when writing it down, conflicting or unknown areas started to emerge.
They use the written narrative as the artifact to synthesize the strategy, and Dominik highlights that the value lies in how easy logical flows are to detect (versus how easy they are to hide in slides).
The formulation of the strategy has 3 essential elements: a target picture of the world in 5 years, the current situation, and a path to get there.
For that formulation, they look for industry trends, sourcing information from their own stats (over 3MM devices) and various market research reports.
A difference in how they handle insight analysis for the hardware world is that they do a more in-depth “NPI Analysis” (New Product Introduction). Given the higher commitment and risks, they create a more robust business case based on the available information.
Dominik shared that for selecting their strategic bets, they combine the size of the opportunity, and their “right to play” (or strengths to win). There is a sweet spot between sizeable growth opportunities and our chances to win in that segment or need.
For hardware, there is a “point of no return.” However, Dominik shared that there are multiple tricks we can use to do “typical discovery” and validate as much as possible before going into mass production.
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