Teams building connected products face a design choice that kills agility: either the device depends on the server for everything, or you build a converter that keeps two data formats in sync. The device has readings and settings in its own format. The server wants those same values as SQL rows. Somebody writes a converter. Then somebody has to keep that converter alive and correct for ten years. The converter approach is why IoT teams move slowly.

Teams that ship features fast need dashboards that answer questions instantly. The usual pattern is to recalculate answers on every refresh, or to ship all your data to a hosted analytics service and wait for it to ingest. Both approaches have the same problem: the dashboard either waits for the query, or you pay for scale you don’t need most of the time. In either case, answering a question about your product becomes a friction point.