Key for IoT Solution

1. Designing the direct interface
Interbrand recently released its list of most valuable brands and ranked Apple as number 1. If we start to look at why people value Apple, it can be traced back to its design philosophy guided by 3 principles - empathy, focus and impute. This means understanding what customers want, forgetting everything else and presenting solutions in a creative and professional manner. What the Interband results show clearly is that people care about beautifully crafted devices vs devices that are awkward to use or recharge

2. Designing the embedded components

design solutions that improve battery and sensor life such that they last for the expected duration of the device.

3. Designing the management interface

If each device we own has a separate app, speaks a different protocol and requires us to read manuals to learn how to manage the device, we are unlikely to leverage that connectivity. We need to develop plug and play devices.  We need to enable things to talk to each other and make meaningful recommendations without requiring people to think of and program each interaction. Things need to be able to learn and adapt to our behavior and help us make decisions.

4. Building solutions

Providing a public API and engaging a community will help us add context in ways that we could not imagine or intend. An API needs to be an integral part of product design.

Identifying API strategy, value proposition, appropriate business model, target audience are important activities for product owners. Picking the right architecture (RESTful or not) for the target audience, maintaining backwards compatibility, up to date API documentation (and sticking to that documentation) are important activities for product builders.APIs provide LEGO like building blocks that can be connected together to extend products.APIs enable services such as IFTTT that make integrating different services as easy as writing a simple if this then that statement. Having an API strategy is an important part of product strategy. After all, if we pick the right business model, APIs can become a key part of the product revenue. for e.g. Expedia doing 90% of their $2B/yr business through their API.

https://www.quora.com/Zhou-Mingchun/blogs