Embedded Platform Strategy: Benefit or Burden? Part 2
In Part 1, we looked at what a platform is, where it makes sense, and where it doesn’t. Now let’s focus on how to make it work in the real world — with the right organizational structure, disciplined engineering practices, and governance.
We’ll also look at the benefits when it’s done right — and the risks if it’s not.
🧑💼 How to Organize for Success
Having a platform only brings value if it is developed and managed properly. This requires clear roles, clear boundaries, and a long-term mindset.
Key principle: separate the platform from the products.
Platform and Product Have Different Goals
The platform is a technology foundation:
It must remain stable, reusable, and evolve carefully.
Its role is to enable products, not to serve any single one exclusively.
The products are customer-facing solutions:
They must move fast, adapt to market needs, and deliver value quickly.
They consume the platform — but should not dictate its internal structure.
They bring deep knowledge of the field, customer needs, and business requirements into the process.
This knowledge should influence how the platform evolves — but it must not erode the platform’s integrity through shortcuts or one-off exceptions.
Blurring these two goals often leads to disaster: unstable platforms, diverging forks, missed deadlines.
Separate Teams, or at Least Separate Functions
Whenever possible, create a dedicated Platform team and separate Product teams:
The Platform team maintains the hardware core (e.g., SoM schematics, reference carriers), software base (bootloaders, OS, middleware), and internal APIs.
The Product teams build applications, extensions, and customer-specific adaptations on top of the platform.
The two teams should collaborate, but with clear contracts:
Stable releases of the platform, with defined interfaces.
Controlled upstream contributions from products into the platform (through a review process).
No last-minute hacks in the platform to solve individual product emergencies.
In larger organizations, the best practice is clear:
A dedicated Platform team maintains the hardware and software base.
Separate Product teams build solutions on top of it.
Each team has different priorities, rhythms, and responsibilities.
In smaller organizations, the same people may have to wear both hats — working on the platform one day, and on a product the next. That’s acceptable as long as the roles are clearly separated at the process level:
Different task tracking for platform and product work
Different acceptance criteria (stability and reusability for platform vs. speed and features for products)
A conscious effort not to mix short-term product hacks into the long-term platform baseline
The critical point is not the size of the team — it’s the clarity of function. The platform must be protected from uncontrolled changes driven by urgent product needs.
Governance: The Backbone of a Sustainable Platform
A successful platform is not just a technical achievement — it is the result of disciplined governance.
Without it, reuse becomes fragility, and shared development turns into shared failures.
Good platform governance rests on three pillars: technical structure, engineering processes, and lifecycle discipline.
Technical Structure: Build Stable Foundations
Version everything — hardware designs, software codebases, documentation.
Define clear interfaces — at both the hardware (pinouts, connectors, form factors) and software levels (APIs, services, protocols).
Maintain a dedicated platform roadmap — independent from short-term product needs, focused on long-term evolution and stability.
Plan platform evolution carefully — breaking changes must be rare, justified, and introduced under control.
Engineering Processes: Enforce Discipline
Systematic branching models — such as
main, feature branches, and per-product branches — to isolate developments and support long-term maintenance.Peer review mandatory for all platform changes — no unchecked commits into the foundation.
Incremental, ticket-driven changes — each change must be tracked, documented, reviewed, and easily reversible if needed.
Continuous integration (CI) pipelines — automatic builds and test runs triggered at every merge to detect regressions early.
Extensive regression testing — from unit tests to full system integration tests, covering both functional and non-functional aspects.
Routine CVE monitoring and patching — ensuring that vulnerabilities in third-party components are tracked and addressed systematically.
Lifecycle Discipline: Think Long Term
Apply full IVVQ practices (Integration, Verification, Validation, Qualification) to the platform itself:
Integration of new features must be controlled and staged.
Verification ensures each addition meets the specification.
Validation confirms the platform still supports product needs.
Qualification certifies that the platform meets the required quality, reliability, and regulatory standards.
Never treat the platform as a disposable artifact.
Products may evolve, be replaced, or die.
The platform is there to last.
Because of the above, no compromise on platform quality is acceptable.
A weak platform quietly damages every future product.
A strong platform amplifies every project built on top of it — reliably, predictably, and sustainably.
📈 Benefits (If Done Properly)
A well-executed platform strategy delivers value at multiple levels — technical, organizational, and even commercial. Here’s what starts to happen when the platform is done right.
Faster Product Development
Once the platform is in place, product teams don’t start from scratch. Bootloaders, BSPs, hardware reference designs, libraries, and infrastructure are already mature.
New products reach MVP faster
Integration time drops
Fewer surprises during bring-up
Time-to-market improves — not just once, but every time.
At one point, I worked for a major supplier of digital ICs, including several microcontroller families. When the strategy shifted to ARM-based designs, we had to introduce a full new range — fast.
The platform approach wasn’t optional; it was the only viable strategy given the impossible pace of product introduction.
With the right internal tools, flows, and a skilled team of designers, the group managed to launch one new microcontroller per month for two years — including silicon, package variants, development kits, and complete generated documentation.
Without a solid platform in place, this would have been unthinkable.
Lower Engineering Cost Per Product
Initial investment is higher, but the payoff scales. Each new product reuses previous effort: drivers, protocols, schematics, test frameworks, documentation.
Less duplication
Fewer bugs to fix
Reduced non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs
The more products you build, the cheaper each one becomes to develop.
Improved Quality and Reliability
Tested once, reused many times. A platform enables consistent validation and regression testing across products.
Fewer regressions
Shared fixes benefit all users
Security updates can be applied centrally
With good governance and CI pipelines in place, platform stability improves with each iteration.
Easier Certification and Compliance
When certification applies (e.g., CE, FCC, IEC 62304, ISO 26262), a common platform reduces the scope and cost.
Reuse previously qualified components
Share test reports and documentation
Align audit trails across product lines
This is especially valuable in medical, industrial, and automotive domains.
Stronger Ecosystem and Brand Consistency
With a shared platform, products behave more consistently. Users see the same UI patterns, the same update flows, the same diagnostics tools — even if the products are different.
Less support overhead
Easier training and onboarding
More coherent brand experience
It strengthens customer trust and improves the perceived quality of the entire product line.
These benefits don’t appear overnight — they emerge with discipline, iteration, and proper governance.
But when they do, they compound, turning the platform into a true strategic asset.
⚠️ Caveats and Risks
A platform strategy can offer significant long-term advantages — but only if you approach it with the right expectations and level of discipline.
Here are some common pitfalls to watch for.
Underestimating the Upfront Investment
A real platform takes time to architect, implement, and stabilize. It’s not a byproduct of a rushed project — it’s a deliberate asset that needs planning and resources.
Trying to build a platform “on the side” while delivering urgent products rarely works.
Premature Generalization
It’s tempting to design a platform that covers every possible future use case. But overly abstract platforms often become bloated, fragile, or unusable in practice.
A better approach is to deploy the platform as a “vehicle” for one, or at most two, real business products.
These first implementations act as stress tests and validation points. Only then should you generalize — based on actual friction points, not imagined futures.
Generality should emerge from iteration — not anticipation.
Anchor the platform in real products first, then abstract carefully. This prevents scope creep and avoids “boiling the ocean.”
Letting Products Dictate Platform Internals
If platform code changes constantly to meet last-minute product needs, it becomes unstable and untrustworthy.
Healthy boundaries are essential: product teams can suggest changes — but platform evolution must remain intentional and versioned.
Neglecting Long-Term Maintenance
A platform is never truly “done.” Technical debt is the enemy.
Without active maintenance, the platform drifts: drivers become outdated, libraries diverge, CVEs accumulate, and new products start forking off their own unstable versions. Governance and tooling must be built to last.
Misalignment Between Teams
If the platform team and product teams don’t communicate regularly, tensions build up. Products may bypass the platform, or the platform may become disconnected from real-world needs.
Platform success depends on active collaboration — and mutual respect for each other’s constraints.
🧩 Conclusion
Choosing a platform approach is not just a technical decision — it’s a strategic one.
Done well, it accelerates development, reduces costs, and strengthens product families. Done poorly, it adds friction and confusion.
There’s no universal blueprint. The right strategy depends on your product roadmap, your organization’s maturity, your team, and your constraints.
Embedded platform tactics and related development strategies are a vast topic — enough to fill entire books.
This article only scratches the surface. At Embedded Expertise, we’ve seen and implemented many different approaches in real-world projects. There’s no single “best” platform model — but there are approaches that work better than others, depending on context.
Call us to discuss your projects, and let’s figure out together what platform strategy fits best.
