Future-Proofing and Industry 4:0: How to Develop Products That Stand the Test of Time

The Fourth Industrial Revolution — a.k.a. Industry 4.0 — is steamrolling product development as we know it. Game-changing technologies like big data, AI, and advanced automation are radically reshaping how products are designed, manufactured, and used. As a result, product developers must grapple with a daunting challenge: How do we create offerings that are strong enough to withstand today’s disruptions and flexible enough to adapt to whatever curveballs the future throws our way?

This is a particularly big challenge for design leaders in the enterprise or industrial space, who are responsible for creating workhorse products that last for decades, not just years. In an era of accelerating technological change, it’s increasingly difficult to design products that will stay relevant for the long lifecycles industrial products require.

The good news is it can be done — if you carefully consider your product’s future as part of a thorough and robust strategy phase. By incorporating smart future-proofing strategies from the get-go, you can directly impact and extend your product’s longevity. Here are five ways to get started.

First, a word of caution. Attempting to foresee every potential product need and technological shift years or decades into the future is an exercise in futility. The pace of change is too rapid — and the future is too uncertain. So don’t put the impossible burden of perfection on yourself or your product. Instead, make it your goal to build flexibility into your product from the start so it can adapt as needs and technologies evolve.

This means avoiding two extremes. Don’t completely lock yourself into meeting only your product’s initial design specifications. And don’t run in circles trying to account for every hypothetical scenario that could arise.

It’s easy to waffle over future-proofing decisions because big architecture choices for long-lifecycle products are so costly to change later. But ultimately, you can’t account for everything — and that’s ok. Focus on what you can control.

For industrial products that need to last for 20 years or more, it’s essential to plan for what’s going to happen over that entire lifespan. Having a clear vision for where your full product portfolio is going is a critical part of future-proofing your products and your business as a whole.

That’s where product development roadmapping comes in. A good product development roadmap should serve as your North Star, helping you identify the key technologies and market shifts that will impact your product line long term.

Don’t have a product development roadmap? It’s time to remedy that. Download our guide to creating a visionary roadmap that will propel your business forward.

Having a roadmap that extends at least 5-10 years into the future allows you to:

• Design each product with the bigger picture in mind
• Avoid over-engineering any one solution by thoughtfully integrating products that work well together
• Anticipate or adapt to the changing technology landscape inherent to Industry 4.0

By weighing desired future options at the start of the project, you can make wise decisions about what to implement now versus what to save for later.

One of the most powerful ways to bake resilience and adaptability into a product is to think of your design as an evolving solution. Rather than trying to solve for every eventuality at the start, make your product modular so you can build on your design over time.

This involves asking questions like:

• Which components and elements are most likely to become obsolete sooner than the rest of the product?
• How can we make provisions to swap out these outdated components for new ones?
• Where can we leave room to build new capabilities and features into the product design as they emerge?
• How can we standardize our design to ensure it’s compatible with fixtures and parts that will need to be replaced down the road?

Factoring in your product’s future needs at the outset may take more time and cost more than simply building a solution for your immediate requirements. But by investing a bit more in the beginning, you can reduce your long term cost of development, help bring future products to market more quickly and prolong your product’s ability to deliver ROI.

The M3 team had this exact realization while working on a recent project. Initially, our team planned for a relatively small component set to meet our client’s explicitly stated needs. But after extensive analysis and debate, we recommended that the client significantly expand the project scope to include dozens of components that wouldn’t be used immediately. The client initially balked at the added expense but quickly saw the wisdom in factoring additional capabilities into the design to guard against premature obsolescence.

Auditing your past products to identify which features evolved and changed from launch to obsolescence is another great way to find opportunities for future-proofing. If elements like wireless connectivity, power requirements, and connectors are significantly different now than they were when you last designed a product, you can bet those areas will shift again before the next product lifecycle ends.

Beyond specific components and parts, it’s also important to evaluate your team’s past future-proofing performance.

• Where did you nail it?
• Where did you miss the mark?
• Were there any avoidable problems you should have anticipated?
• What do you wish you would have thought about?
• And what would you do differently now that you know better?

There’s always something to learn — even if you’re adept at intentionally incorporating future-proofing into your product design process. For example, our team was once revamping a product by designing a new module to go into the same slot as an existing component. To prevent customers from replacing a faulty module with something other than what had been plugged in previously, we implemented a keying system capable of interfacing with four different modules.

We thought we had cleverly solved the challenge, but quickly realized that our approach was shortsighted. What if our client needed to introduce a fifth flavor to keep up with the competition? We inadvertently limited how many different module variations we could offer down the road – limiting the opportunity to introduce new capabilities and technology.

By examining our choices and taking the time to learn from that misstep, we were able to design a better solution the next time around.

There’s a difference between future-proofing your products and trying to give them eternal life. No matter how well you think through future opportunities, there will come a time when your product’s lifespan comes to an end.

Here are a few signs that it’s time to stop adapting your product and design something new:

• You’ve designed a Frankenstein. The aesthetics are so mangled that you risk damaging your company’s image and causing brand confusion.
• You’re boxed in and simply can’t fit a square peg into a round hole. If you’re trying to retrofit your product for a revolutionary technology that’s going to significantly alter how your users experience it, it’s time to start from scratch.
• Time has taken its inevitable toll. Nothing lasts forever, and every product will eventually start to show signs of age. Perception can influence reality, and if your product looks like something out of the 1980s, your customers may assume it doesn’t belong in the age of Industry 4.0.
• Users aren’t satisfied. Once your product is no longer meeting your users’ needs, there’s no point for it to exist. Cut your losses and start again.

Industry 4.0’s disruptions are inescapable. But for visionary design leaders like you, the current pace of product innovation can be exciting, not scary — as long as you learn to embrace the art of future-proofing.

Outline a long-term product roadmap to guide your decisions. Design for modularity and configurability. Audit past successes and failures to learn what worked and what didn’t. Finally, know when it’s time to stop tinkering and start fresh with a clean-slate, next-generation design.

Just remember: You don’t have to figure this challenge out alone. M3 would love to help — so let’s talk.