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Why do you need a product suite Roadmap?

In order to become a driving force in any technology market, it is paramount to create a long-term technology roadmap that looks into the future to ensure product flexibility and sustainability.

“The lack of a well-defined roadmap can result in a product strategy that is always trying to keep up with the market instead of driving the market. It can also result in an array of expensive, stop-gap product development exercises that stall or delay the deployment of true market innovations”

There are always unexpected features and requirements that will materialize throughout the life of a product offering that will require an immediate response, however, a solid long-term plan will allow these events to be addressed in a timely manner while retaining the integrity of long-term goals. A well-defined roadmap acts as solid backbone architecture that allows new features and requirements to be added to the product with the least impact to existing product hardware and software deployments.

A roadmap can:

Provide a master plan for products and supporting services
Create an agile backbone to cogently add requirements – produces a capable rolling chassis with faster feature roll-out
Reduce reactive, distracting development strategies (feature of the week syndrome)
Identify key future technologies and disruptive features
Encourage the integration of all systems and supporting architectures (reduced operating costs)
Reduce redundant development initiatives
Provide a solid management tool for the whole company, especially for architects, department managers, and executive management
Showcase a proactive technology path to customers and the investment community

A well-defined roadmap chronicles the availability of products across the various phases of product maturity and should be developed as a joint exercise with the major stakeholders within the organization.

A successful roadmap must include the following considerations:

Potential leap-frog technologies
Current state of the competition
Long-term support requirements
Technology build vs. buy decisions
Market direction and predictions
Market requirements timing
Long-term economic goals
Changing regulatory requirements
Evolving societal perceptions/initiatives
Known feature requirements
Feature deployment priorities

Long-term business strategy
Financial commitment for the product
Support from key stakeholders
Availability and roadmap of industry components
Incremental improvement schedules
Product and feature scalability
Integration of products into existing infrastructure
Migration plan for new/legacy products
Deployment schedule for new products
Timing of capital requirements
Available resource allocation

Let Cottonwood Creek Technologies help you create this roadmap for your organization

What is CCT’s Design Philosophy?

The fundamental objective of any product design is to ensure that the final product addresses current and foreseeable market needs and is responsible for positively influencing revenue generation throughout the life of the product. This mandates that the design requirements are comprehensive and fully vetted before the project is implemented. Several key principles that CCT incorporates to guide a successful design include the following:

Market Input: Input from the market is probably the most important consideration when designing a new product. Creating additional market opportunities and ensuring that customer’s needs are fulfilled and ensure that positive revenue results are realized throughout the life of the product are paramount.
Future Features: A new design is the perfect opportunity to incorporate disruptive features into the product that may shake-up the market. The design must have adequate performance headroom and ubiquitous interface capability to support these new known features and the flexibility to support future unknown features.
Functionality: Ensure that the requirements and use-case scenarios are all satisfied with a comprehensive design that supports the product’s long-term roadmap.
Reliability: Design inherent reliability into all components to strive for an expected life cycle of the product that will exceed ten years of service or an appropriate lifecycle as defined by the service provider. Providing an ‘engineered’ product instead of a ‘piecemeal’ assembled product is key to meeting the reliability requirement.
Compatibility: Efforts to provide backward compatibility with existing products and support infrastructure will be considered and evaluated to provide a reasonable upgrade path for the service provider.
Manufacturing Economics: Manufacturing costs will be considered in all phases of the design to provide the most economical cost-to-functionality ratio that meets the market’s and service provider’s cost expectations
Maintainability: Serviceability of any hardware will be considered in the design to reduce repair time, ensure that sub-components are designed to be serviceable, and reduce periodic maintenance.
Sustainability: Ensuring a consistent build quality and component availability throughout the product’s manufacturing lifecycle to reduce or avoid mid-life redesign efforts to continue product delivery.
Safety: Mechanical and electrical designs will include the necessary features to mitigate potential user and service personnel safety hazards.
Certification: All aspects of mechanical safety, electrical safety, and radiated emissions will be considered in the design criteria to satisfy appropriate certification requirements.
Collaboration: CCT anticipates working very closely with our client’s technical and business resources to ensure that the design is fully compatible with their expectations and capabilities.
Responsible Design and Manufacturing: The design effort of hardware will include consideration for low-impact environmental consequences during manufacturing in an effort to reduce the carbon footprint during this phase. The design will also include consideration for build materials that support end-of-life options including recycling of these build materials and selecting materials that promote low environmental toxicity. The power consumption of devices is also a consideration to promote low power usage that reduces environmental impact and benefits the service provider by reducing power provisioning costs.
User Welfare: The design will incorporate any considerations that might improve the health and welfare of the user and is capable of adapting to the ever-changing societal concerns of target markets
Support Capabilities: Ensuring that the design will consist of an architecture that can be supported long-term by the service provider with existing or planned support resources. This includes both development resources and field-deployed product support personnel.
Roadmap Compatibility: Make sure that the new product enhances the current product suite roadmap and provides continuity to the overall product philosophy.

How can CCT’s Applied Research service help your organization?

One of the uncomfortable realities of technology development groups is the issue of resources being overwhelmed with production development and not having enough bandwidth to explore new technology paths. CCT can help solve this issue by providing a research extension of your development groups to explore these new paths. CCT will work with your product management and development resources to create an integrated effort that gets you the information you need. Key advantages include:

Provide dedicated resources for specific research initiatives
Able to spend the necessary time to dig-down for a comprehensive hardware and software analysis
Free-up time from you production developers
Creating an independent perspective of possible solutions
Concentrated effort can create new intellectual property
CCT’s wealth of product design experience to efficiently focus research efforts
Provide multiple solutions that promote the selection of the best option

CCT will customize a research program or project specifically for your requirements so you can get the answers you need in a timely manner.

Specific hardware and software design technologies

In the course of designing a variety of products, CCT has accumulated considerable experience in many disciplines. Here are some example areas of design and experience that we have utilized in our products:

Systems Engineering

IoT architectures
High-reliability/availability telecom systems
Fault-tolerant, fallback systems
Low power battery powered systems
WAN/LAN hardware device design
Web server applications -embedded
Data processing architectures
Remote device management
Medical devices

VoIP architectures
Embedded system design
Ethernet transport systems
DC power systems – extended distance
DSL transport devices
Modern user interface devices
Space-based device support
Camera-enabled devices
Mass data storage devices

Hardware Engineering

A/D and D/A conversion
Battery backup systems
Low-power designs
MIPI camera interfaces
Secure access architectures
Audio amplifier designs
Digital & analog test systems
USB interface designs
Motor control design
Extended DC power systems
Switching power supplies
Power-over-Ethernet designs
Data acquisition designs
Wire & cabling layouts
Electrical connector design
DSP processors

Analog switching circuitry
CMOS, low-power apps
Custom component design
LVDS display interfaces
LED lighting controls
I2C, SPI designs
Microprocessor-based systems
Medical device controls
Photovoltaic control system
Environmental sensor controls
Renewable heating controls
Voice generation and detection
Power fault-detection methods
Wearable products

Mechanical Engineering

Extreme-use designs – physical hardening
Sheet metal designs
Aluminum casting designs
Plastic component design
Light management for displays

CAD-based design and analysis
3D printed designs
Mechanical actuator design
User touch interfaces
Electro-mechanical interfaces

Software Engineering

Linux OS
Windows OS
Visual Studio
C, C++, C#, Basic, and Assembly
Scripting languages
HTML and CGI
ASP.NET, MVC

SQL Database design and interfaces
Embedded firmware design
Real-time OS design
Multi-tasking architectures
Real-time data communications
Proprietary LAN interfaces

Product Technology Analysis

Having an independent assessment of your technology can be a valuable management tool when evaluating the future direction of your product offerings. CCT can provide this perspective and many times offer alternate paths to consider when deciding how to approach future development programs, product migration plans, or new feature roll-outs. In some cases, finding ways to extract additional capabilities from legacy products to bridge over to new products may be a viable strategy that can be revealed during a product audit. In addition to evaluating the overall technology used in a product, CCT can provide deep-dive design reviews of hardware, firmware, and software components to determine possible improvements and to investigate problem areas.

Merger and Acquisition Reviews

When entering into the merger or acquisition of outside companies, it is always necessary to evaluate the core technology of the target company in order to provide realistic intellectual property valuations. Having internal resources evaluate these intellectual properties can provide a good perspective but it is often prudent to have an independent evaluation to provide a non-bias evaluation.

In addition to properly valuating technologies, it is important to verify that the advertised products actually operate as advertised and are supportable for the required product life.

CCT can provide this independent perspective of valuation, verification of operation, and help plan possible migration strategies of how these acquired products can be integrated into current product lineups.