Dinner at a birthday party my daughter is invited to is simultaneously the most challenging and the easiest thing in the world. On the one hand, you get nice food and my daughter can play; on the other hand, you don’t know the other parents. That offers you a gift: you get the chance to meet new people and get to know them. And sometimes you have a really nice conversation about a specific topic you care deeply about.
One particular instance was a conversation about electric vehicles. A fascinating thing happens when adults talk about EVs: they share their experiences around charging, range, and what particular vehicle they own. Like teenagers talking about their new flip phones, way back when we had flip phones and compared their functionality.
One father stood out. He talked about how he had a trailer and needed a new car, so he looked at EVs that had enough power for his trailer. He did not ask the question of whether an EV could actually take on a trailer. He looked for an EV that could do it and bought one. He does not regret his choice.
While this story sounds like an outlier, it is not. We count the success of technologies by total units sold and compare them with each other. The company that sells more has won the race, while the company that has sold less has lost the race. Additionally, when it comes to the adoption of new technologies, we tend to ask the undecided rather than the user.
Here, heat pumps are a popular example. Instead of only asking whether they can work in cold climates, we can look at places where people are already using them. In fact, some of Europe's coldest countries have some of its highest heat-pump penetration rates. In 2021, Norway had more than 60 heat pumps installed per 100 households, while Sweden and Finland had around 45 each [1]. You rarely hear that people choose a heat pump because it can deliver around four units of heat for every unit of electricity consumed [2].
Adoption is not the end of the story. It is the moment a product enters the environment it was actually built for. Suddenly, thousands of users are generating something that was scarce before the product was released: real-world experience. What can we do with that information? Enter the possibilities of software updates.
Companies still treat software updates as a necessity rather than an opportunity for improvement. Providing software updates is not just about fixing bugs anymore. It is about accepting the reality that a product can have a longer lifecycle than anticipated – which is a good thing.
A physical product and its software evolve on different timescales. The physical product may remain useful long after its original software has aged. We have seen this with computers, then smartphones, and now cars. The longer we keep a device, the more valuable meaningful software updates become. The world changes, and the device should be able to adapt to it.
Users might even be willing to pay for a good software update – but make it reasonable and let the user decide whether they want the update or not.
But software can also achieve the exact opposite. Instead of extending a product’s useful life, it can introduce dependencies with much shorter lifecycles than the physical product itself. Like when companies force us to use our smartphones to interact with a device, preferably over a server.
Take a wallbox, for instance. Because of safety, you cannot simply pull out the cable while charging – only when the car is not charging. But every so often, the cable gets stuck in the wallbox. The only way to unlock the cable is by using the app. What if there is no internet, your phone is empty, or you don’t want to use the phone? There is no security lever or NFC tag you can use.
It is not that companies don’t think about this; they do. The wallbox itself doesn’t need the internet to physically release the cable. So why does my recovery path depend on an app and potentially a server?
We know of companies that went bankrupt, and features that needed servers became useless. Users paid for them and relied on them every day, but when the company went bankrupt and the servers went down, those features became useless.
A product that can change after it has been sold does not have to become dependent on the company that sold it. Quite the opposite. If software allows us to extend the useful life of a physical product, we should design the software around that lifetime as well.
Don’t feel embarrassed because you made your product better. Do it – be the company that learns, adapts, and even listens to user feedback to improve the product. Don’t hide behind imaginary numbers that someone chose for a race that then decided whether the product was a success or not.
Next time you are in a meeting discussing a lifecycle decision about a product, ask whether this serves the user or the release schedule.
Remember: let the user decide. Build it together with them.
Source:
1: “Coming in from the cold: Heat pump efficiency at low temperatures” www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(23)00351-3
2: The Future of Heat Pumps from INTERNATIONAL ENERGY AGENCY