Tangibles: How Software Turns Hardware into Platforms
Most connected products don't fail because the technology breaks. They fail because the strategy does.
A watch, a coffee maker, a tractor - the moment software lets a physical product keep learning after it ships, the business behind it changes. One-time sales become long relationships. Fixed feature sets become evolving systems. Margin defense becomes compounding advantage.
Yoel Frischoff calls these products tangibles, and this is the playbook for building them.
Drawing on 35 years in design, engineering, and product strategy, Tangibles walks the full life of a connected product - conceived, validated, launched, secured, regulated, monetized, and managed long after it reaches the customer. Across six arcs and twenty-five chapters, you'll get:
Frameworks you can apply to your own product - the Lean Hardware Funnel, the Decoupled MVP, the Three Axes of Disruption, the Positioning Audit, and the seven-layer Tangible Stack.
The financial tools a hardware PM actually needs - contribution margin, cost of capital, and NPV, with worked examples.
Hard lessons from real companies - SharkNinja, Dyson, Swatch vs. Apple Watch, Rabbit and Humane, Nespresso, Tesla, iRobot, John Deere, and Oura.
A clear-eyed look at the new obligations connected products create - security across the whole attack surface, the global regulatory baseline, repairability, and data that turns from asset into liability.
It closes with the second watershed - AI - and the practitioner this book has been building toward: the tangibles product manager, who holds atoms and bits together across incompatible clocks and owns decisions that can't be undone with a deploy.
Paired with a live companion site at tangibles-book.com, where the book's frameworks run as interactive tools you can use on your own product.
For founders, product managers, and innovation leaders building hardware that has to compete in a software world.
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