Tangibles: How Software Turns Hardware into Platforms

I can't pull the live Amazon copy — Amazon blocks automated fetching — and your site doesn't carry the listing description verbatim anywhere I could read. So here's a KDP-ready draft built from verified material on tangibles-book.com. If you wanted the existing description instead, paste it and I'll edit rather than replace.

Physical products are becoming platforms. Most hardware companies are still selling them once.

A smartwatch and a city car now run the same playbook. A product becomes a tangible the moment software lets it keep learning after it ships — adapting to need, and earning from services that didn't exist at the point of sale.

Tangibles is a field guide for the people who have to make that transition actually work: product managers, founders, and engineers building connected hardware.

Across 25 chapters in six arcs, it moves from hardware's structural constraints — long lead times, capital intensity, tooling you can't patch — through connectivity and edge intelligence, validation, positioning, the security and societal obligations that now arrive as law, and finally the business models that make recurring revenue work on a physical product.

Inside:

The Decoupled MVP and a seven-stage Lean Hardware Funnel with kill gates — cut the cost of being wrong before tooling and inventory harden the mistake

The Positioning Audit and the Three Axes of Disruption — buyers decide what kind of thing your product is before they decide whether to buy it

The seven-layer Tangible Stack, recurring-revenue modelling, and NPV across the product lifetime

What the EU Cyber Resilience Act, ETSI EN 303 645, and the UK PSTI Act actually require of a manufacturer — including the 24-hour incident report that starts 11 September 2026

The costs that become liabilities: repair hostility, remote lock-in, data you wish you hadn't collected

First-person cases and post-mortems throughout: Better Place, iRobot, Tesla and BYD, SharkNinja, Dyson, Apple, Swatch, Nespresso, Oura, John Deere, Jeep, 23andMe.

Every framework in the book also runs as a free interactive tool at tangibles-book.com — a security scorecard, an ETSI-mapped requirements generator, regulatory-landscape mapping, and NPV calculators. No registration, no email wall.

With a foreword by Sanjay Sarma (MIT).

"This book is important at this time because the tech community has over-rotated so heavily toward software that it no longer appreciates the points being made here." — Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm

Yoel Frischoff is a product strategist with over 35 years in industrial design, engineering, and technology management. Through his consultancy TheRoad, he helps hardware companies become service-connected platforms.