Not too long ago, writing an app meant battling memory management and enough low-level wizardry to give any developer a thousand-yard stare.
Then came Flutter, React Native, and a wave of high-performance platforms that said, “Don’t worry about the plumbing, just build the thing.” Creating apps simply became easier, shifting the focus to user experience, which ultimately benefited us all.
In product design, we are now at a similar turning point for connected consumer electronics. Microcontrollers from chip manufacturers like Nordic offer one-size-fits-many solutions that make development significantly easier. They’re powerful, cost-effective, and ideal not just for prototyping but, more importantly, for production. Why does this matter? Because now, with the right partners, you no longer need to dedicate vast resources to squeezing everything onto the tiniest possible PCB when most of what you need is already baked into a chip smaller than a one-pence piece. Yes, you could reduce your BOM cost with a perfectly optimised design, but the trade-off could be a vastly increased development budget and lead times that might prevent your business from scaling.
So developing a new smart product is now less about technical feasibility and clever miniaturisation and more about the device’s user experience as a whole. Gone are the days of demanding a thinner phone for thinness’ sake, people want something they can actually hold. And yes, the battery is often the biggest consideration, but depending on the application, these chips can last up to a decade on a simple coin cell.
In short, production-level prototyping is now possible, adding sensors and connectivity is easier than ever, and the barriers that once slowed smart product development are quickly disappearing, leading to a future of better scalable products.
So if you’re in the smart tech space, now’s the time to think bigger. The pieces are ready. What are you going to build?
