Tobias Kästner designs system and software architectures for medical devices for more than ten years. In this time he has seen and suffered through a lot of woes and problems, stemming from decades-old development procedures and ineffective communications within product development teams. Worse yet, many persistent beliefs about how projects ought to be run have become completely inappropriate for today's connected and ever faster moving world. Having followed Zephyr ever since its 1.10 release, the speaker has been using it in numerous projects collecting a considerable amount of experience to share. In his talk he will explain what profound impact technologies such as Kconfig or the Device tree have on the collaboration of hardware and software developers alike. Being also an advocate of model based systems engineering Tobias will use examples from his real-world projects to show how system models can inform downstream engineering activities. Thanks to Zephyr's many clever design decisions, collaboration can be made more effective and the risks of costly misunderstandings can be significantly reduced. The talk concludes with some ideas what the future might hold and what still needs to be done for the Zephyr project to succeed in the medical device and similar industries.