In early 2023, MachineMetrics was facing a critical bottleneck in its customer onboarding experience. I was a Senior Product Designer embedded in a fast-moving industrial IoT environment. Our platform provided manufacturers with real-time analytics from factory machines, but ironically, the first step—provisioning edge devices—was a massive pain point.

Customers had to wait 1–2 weeks to receive preconfigured hardware, follow fragile Bluetooth pairing processes, and often call support just to get devices online. The edge experience was error-prone, slow, and confusing—exactly the opposite of what an IoT platform should feel like.

It wasn’t just annoying—it was blocking trial conversions, overloading support, and killing our scalability. One support manager told me bluntly:

“Provisioning is where we lose trust. Customers hit a wall before they even get started.”

That’s when I was asked to lead a redesign—not just to improve usability, but to completely rethink how customers onboarded edge devices. The goal?

Enable self-service provisioning that works on physical or virtual edge hardware, with no MM involvement, no Bluetooth, and setup time under 1 hour.

🔧 Task

My mission had three parts:

1. Reduce time-to-connectivity from weeks to less than 1 hour.
2. Eliminate Bluetooth and proprietary hardware dependencies.
3. Design a self-service flow that was intuitive, secure, and scalable across both virtual and physical deployments.

Success would mean lower support burden, faster trial conversions, and turning a known weakness into a competitive advantage.

🔨 Actions