For Pragmatic Product Leaders

Course Structure for Hardware & IoT Product Management

1. The 4 “S” es:
a. Selection of the Job to be Done or the Problem to be Solved – the What?
b. Scoping of the platform? – because any hardware product “line” is
essentially a platform with seemingly endless variants & diverse
applications. Its de facto required to guesstimate what the extent of this
platform is and what is a nonnegotiable no-no even before you test it out in
the market to see product market fit.
c. Scale of deployment? Customized boutique or mass produced? (2x2
matrix)
d. Sizing: How large is a large market that the product/platform intends to
serve?
2. Components:
a. The technology depth – all about the physics & mathematics of it
b. The hardware definition, vendor evaluation & engineering
c. The firmware definition, vendor evaluation & engineering
d. The cloud definitions, vendor evaluation & engineering (in case your
hardware needs to connect to cloud)
3. IoT Special – the cloud, edge, fog & mist of computing & security paradigms
4. Product Lifecycle Operations:
a. Timelines – 18 months to 36 months. What happens when?
b. Preparing for series mass production
c. Ensuring build quality
d. Performing effective & efficient root-cause analysis of field failures
5. Marketing, Sales & Distribution
a. Selecting appropriate product distribution channels
b. What stakeholders want, need, require, demand, and expect – customers,
executive leadership of own organization, testers & evaluators in customer’s
organization, Product Managers in vendor & customer organizations and
end users
c. Marathoning for long build cycles & long product end of life
d. Building & maintaining trust
About: Kunjan is a 2013 BITS Goa Alum with experience in building products in energy
for Gram Power (rural electrification & IoT metering), hospitality for OYO (D2C hospitality)
& patent pending IoT products for SEDEMAC (B2B mechatronics). The most relevant is
an “end to end” IoT device & device management platform build for SEDEMAC and is
being used in 8 countries on all continents except for Antarctica & Australia. SEDEMAC
specializes in building core technology (usually patent worthy) intelligent electronics
products that see widespread use.

1 of 3
For Pragmatic Product Leaders

Case Studies:

1. Laptop Design: Take a seat on the Product Manager’s chair in charge of making your
laptop. Laptop is perhaps one of the first mass produced IoT Device in the world. If you
think of it; it is not more than a 20-year-old phenomenon. Have you ever wondered how
did the world create & cater to a market this huge in 20 years?
a. How many sub-systems do you think are there in your current laptop?
b. What is a typical structure of those sub-systems?
c. What will be the count (& names) of distinct electronic & mechanical components
used in your laptop?
d. Did the “brand” of your laptop make all those components or did it source it?
e. A microprocessor is the most critical component of the laptop – what kind of
business relationship does the brand of your laptop have with the company who
made its microprocessor?
f. What OS does your laptop run on?
g. Does the brand of your laptop have any business relationship with the OS maker,
or the OS maker has any relationship with you (the user)?
h. If you were tasked to make the next generation variant of your current laptop –
what would be the feature-set of that laptop (assume that hardware & firmware
engineering are sorted & are going to be inherited from the existing laptop’s repo)?
i. How would you conduct an Intellectual Property Rights infringement study if your
new feature set requires adding features that a competitor already has?
2. Hard Disk Design: Take a seat in the chair of the Product Manager responsible for putting
together the hard disk that ran in your very first computer. Assume a disk drive (not SSD).
a. What performance parameters will be of importance to you while designing the
hard disk?
b. What will be the typical specification of the hard disk & its feature set?
c. How would you validate if your customers need those features?
d. What would you do if your customers ask for a feature-set which you think will not
fly based on your market validation report made earlier?
3. TV Remote Design: Take a seat in the chair of a new Product Manager tasked to design
a Smart TV’s remote. Say a remote for Samsung 80 cm (32 inches) Wondertainment
Series HD Ready LED Smart TV UA32TE40AAKXXL (picked up from Amazon).
a. What sensors would you put in the remote?
b. Will the remote have a micro-controller? If yes, how will you chose it?
c. What will be the final mechanical dimensions of the remote?
d. What buttons will you put in the remote?
e. Can you make a sample product manual just for the remote?
4. Washing Machine Design: Take a position in the standing chair of a Product Manager in-
charge of building your home’s washing machine.
a. What electro-mechanical sub-systems are there in the washing machine?
b. What kind of motor does your machine use?
c. Does your machine have any electronics in it? If yes, what are those?
d. How does the washing machine’s power circuit look like?

2 of 3
For Pragmatic Product Leaders

e. How would you communicate to the end user how many clothes to put in the
machine? How do you tell them if you overload the machine may break down?
f. How would you put together a system (in terms of people & processes) to address
post sales issues?
g. How will you measure customer satisfaction on post-sales service support?
h. How will you link data from consumer satisfaction to sales growth – this may be
required by your top management for the approval of budgets for the system you
put together in earlier step?
5. Google Home Design: There is high likelihood that you or someone you know has used
a 2-way home assistant like Amazon Echo, Google Home or Apple Home Pod. Can you
think and answer the following about it – take any example you like.
a. What parts of speech does it process locally and what does it send to central
cloud?
b. What sensors are used in the hardware?
c. What communication protocol is best suited for applications of that kind for the
device to communicate to the cloud?
6. MI Watch Design: MI has a series of low-featured, low-cost mass market smart watches,
typically having Bluetooth only. Chose any such smart watch.
a. Can you list the various electronic components used in the watch?
b. What is the specification of the battery used in such a watch & why is that so?
c. What kind of touch interface is used in such watches and why so?
d. How does it sync data between a smart phone & itself whenever you sync it?
e. On Manufacturing: How will you plan & budget for making the watch of your
choice?
f. How will you ensure quality of each piece which goes out of your source factory?
g. What will be your cost of manufacturing? Cost of design? & Cost of components
used? How will you determine the price of the watch based on that?
7. Apple Watch Design: Apple watches are heavy on features & high on price compared to
MI’s watches.
a. Can you list the sensors used in Apple iWatch 6?
b. How does it sense your ECG?
c. All Apple watches have GNSS & Cellular connectivity – how are the antennae
placed in the watch?
d. How do you specify what antennae would you want to use for your Apple iWatch 6
to the hardware engineering team designing it?
8. Jawbone Case Study: What do you think went wrong with Jawbone? What would it have
done differently to compete with others in wearables market?
9. Better Place Charging Infrastructure: Better Place was an Electric Vehicle Charging
Infrastructure company which failed despite all the billions of dollars & talents available to
it? What are your inferences from the history of Better Place?
10. What are patents & why do you file them? Why are they called Product Manager’s
Landmines?

---End of Document---

3 of 3