Concept Product Design for an IoT Startup

An independent consultant in the commercial development industry patented an idea that projected to solve unsustainable building practices that exist today during the Design, Construction, and Operations of commercial buildings.

The founder had the vision for the solution and wanted to design a viable product around his idea.

How do we go from an IoT concept to a successful product design?

We analyzed the 24 subject matter experts across all three stages of the commercial building development lifecycle. Through primary (ethnographic) and secondary research, we learned that if we could solve pains within the Operations stage of the lifecycle, that would allow us to ultimately solve for other building development stages in the future.

Our goal was to create a minimally viable and desirable product that would address pains for facility departments within building Operations. Over time, the data collected from the MVP (Operations phase of the building lifecycle) would eventually inform the full design of an IoT product for all three stages of a commercial real estate build out (Design, Construction, and Operations).

During our analysis, we created customer profiles, journey maps, product requirements and further questions to be answered through proof of concept testing. Those insights assisted in the creation of low-fidelity wireframes to test against with users and early adopters.