Time to market is longer for connected devices than for software because physical steps cannot be skipped: board revisions, enclosure tooling, radio and safety certification, pilot production and logistics. Each loop through a hardware revision can add months. Missing a season or a customer’s procurement cycle can cost more than the whole development budget.
The common ways to shorten it are reuse and parallelism. Pre-certified IoT modules remove most radio certification work; off-the-shelf gateways and cloud platforms avoid building infrastructure; an MVP scoped to one use case avoids feature creep; and starting CE marking and FCC testing on early units while firmware matures overlaps otherwise serial steps. The trade-off is usually unit cost or differentiation, which is why a product often launches on a module and moves to a custom design once volume justifies the NRE.
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