Cowboy: A new electric bike for urban riders

The COWBOY team combines extensive expertise in the world of tech-startups, but they lacked some knowledge on electronics and IoT to make their bike connected and smart. Productize has been building up expertise in IoT for several years now and we often find ourselves in the company of tech-startups. These startups are usually in the begin stage of their product conception and we support them in quickly developing testable prototypes so that they can fail fast, gather feedback, iterate and reach a high level of customer satisfaction when they launch.

On top of the imposed delays and the necessary flexibility while developing the bikes’ intelligence & the interactions with the motor, the biggest challenge of the project was to integrate all technologies elegantly into the bike’s frame.

We accompanied COWBOY through the whole conception of their connected electric bike. We were responsible for the overall product development. This process included but wasn’t limited to the following deliverables; the product specifications, the choice of which components to use, writing the firmware, designing and testing the first prototypes work-like & look-like and the execution & follow-up of the first field tests. This project was carried out in close collaboration between the consultants from our side and the COWBOY developers, followed by a progressive transfer of responsibilities towards their internal technical core team.

In addition to our expertise in electronics engineering, the agile development process we follow allowed the team to move towards testable prototypes very quickly and try them in real-life. This gave us very valuable feedback in the earliest stages of development which made it easy to make adjustments to the specifications and functionalities. This iterative and flexible approach pushed everybody to conceive a fully-functioning product within only 1 year.

This project was very challenging in terms of physical limitations and radio-interference because all things tech had to be hidden into the bike’s frame. It really pushed us and we learned that sometimes strict boundaries ignite our creativity most of all.