Why It’s Time to Stop Thinking in Terms of Devices — and Start Thinking in Terms of Systems

The device isn’t dead, but it’s no longer the center of the story. The ecosystem is.

For the past decade or so, most product development teams have been building smart, embedded devices. A touchscreen here, a custom board there, some tightly packed firmware, maybe a cloud hook or two.

But what I’ve seen lately is a fundamental shift in how products are developed.

We’re no longer just building “devices.” We’re building systems. Fleets. Ecosystems. And the companies that realize this shift early are the ones who will thrive in the next generation of connected, AI-enabled, cyber-secure products.

Here’s what I mean.

From Device to System

Historically, a product was a thing. A piece of hardware with embedded software, designed for a single use case and a single user. A thermostat. A car dashboard. A medical pump.

Today, that same “device” is just one node in a much bigger system. It’s part of a fleet. It talks to cloud services. It might integrate with mobile apps, local servers, edge processors, machine vision systems, even third-party APIs. Take automotive as an example. A car isn’t just a car anymore. It’s an edge device for the driver, a diagnostic tool for the service center, a data source for road infrastructure, a mobile node for your phone, and a sensor platform for pedestrians and nearby vehicles. 

It’s a system with multiple users, multiple environments and multiple goals. That means it needs to play well with dozens of other services.

The Complexity Cliff

I’ve seen firsthand the natural instinct for many engineering teams is to solve this problem by making the device more powerful. “Let’s pack everything in here — business logic, UI, AI processing, payment integration, network comms, security layers.”

While it’s an understandable approach, it leads to what I call the complexity cliff. You end up trying to jam cybersecurity, communications stacks, data processing, machine vision and UX/UI into a single embedded system with limited compute and limited memory. And sometimes, limited in-house expertise.

The result? Development slows down. Costs rise. Bugs get harder to trace. Updates become riskier. Teams burn out. And supporting that device, at scale, becomes a nightmare.

The smarter move – and where I see product development accelerating toward – is to architect a system from day one.

Think System, Not Device

Maybe the edge device is simple, just a sensor or actuator with basic comms. The heavy lifting happens on-prem or in the cloud. The UI lives in a mobile app or tablet. Analytics and AI inference are offloaded to where they can be done best. 

In other words, the device itself does what it needs to do and nothing more.

In my opinion, that modular, system-first thinking makes everything easier. Security is more contained. It’s possible to swap parts out without ripping the whole system apart. Updates are faster and safer. Development time shrinks. 

An important point: code reuse grows significantly. When you’re thinking in terms of families of products rather than one-off devices you can roll out product variants much faster. Same backend, new hardware. Same app, new workflow. You don’t have to rebuild the whole stack every time.

With a systems approach encompassing shared services, clean APIs and reusable modules, the second product takes half the time. The third is even faster. That’s how companies go from three-year product cycles to one-year launches. And moving quickly from ideas to impact is the name of the game.

When the Kitchen Gets Hot

This shift is happening everywhere. Take restaurant equipment. You’re building a smart stove. You want it connected, configurable, secure and intelligent. But putting a full computer under a 500-degree piece of metal isn’t exactly an elegant thermodynamic solution.

Instead, imagine a small embedded controller in the stove, offloading logic to an on-prem server or cloud. The chef uses a mobile app or tablet. Data from multiple appliances gets aggregated. The franchise owner sees analytics. The corporate office gets predictive maintenance reports.

That’s not just a device, it’s a system. And that’s where embedded development is going. 

Why AI and Cybersecurity Change the Game

So why the shift? The real accelerants here are AI and cybersecurity. When you add AI and machine vision into the mix and layer in today’s security requirements, complexity doesn’t just double. It grows exponentially.

You’re not just building software anymore. You’re engineering systems that sense, decide, learn, and secure themselves. And that’s where traditional software engineering reaches its limits. Gone are the days when you needed a software team to build your device. Now, what you really need is a systems partner—someone who can architect not just the code, but the entire solution, from edge to cloud.

The Bottom Line

The device isn’t dead. But it’s no longer the center of the story. The ecosystem is. The companies that will lead the next wave of innovation are the ones that recognize this shift, invest early in systems thinking, and prioritize modularity, security, scalability and reuse. So if you’re planning your next product launch, I’d encourage you to zoom out. Don’t just ask, “How do I build this device?” Ask instead, “How do I build a system that supports this device — and every device that comes after it?”

That’s where the future is heading. And that’s where we’re going.

For more on my thoughts about software development, read my blog Don’t DIY Your Next Software Product: Why a Homebuilder Approach Wins.