Our guest in this episode is Matt Negaard. He’s been involved in sales and business development roles, product development, roles responsible for technical requirements, led entire teams, and he doesn’t hold back in sharing what he’s learned as a product portfolio owner within IoT and IIoT.
If you like learning from the experience, stories, and thought processes of other IoT professionals, this is your chance to learn what his takeaways have been evangelizing IoT through the years prior to the mass consideration of wireless and cloud-based solutions that we see today. Whether you've been in the IoT space for years or you're looking to get into the space and want to know what it’s like working on connected products and what it takes to get them out into the world, you'll walk away with some great takeaways.
Our guest in this episode is Matt Negaard. He’s been involved in sales and business development roles, product development, roles responsible for technical requirements, led entire teams, and he doesn’t hold back in sharing what he’s learned as a product portfolio owner within IoT and IIoT.
If you like learning from the experience, stories, and thought processes of other IoT professionals, this is your chance to learn what his takeaways have been evangelizing IoT through the years prior to the mass consideration of wireless and cloud-based solutions that we see today. Whether you've been in the IoT space for years or you're looking to get into the space and want to know what it’s like working on connected products and what it takes to get them out into the world, you'll walk away with some great takeaways.
welcome to conversations in connectivity. I'm Ryan Carlson, your host. This is a podcast for the IOT professionals and product leaders. Responsible. For conductivity operations within their organizations and interested in learning how others are harnessing connectivity, controlling costs and scaling successfully in the industries they serve. This episode is going to be interesting for those that have been in the IOT space for a while, because no, you're not crazy. We're all dealing with a lot of the same challenges and been forced to figure out how to do a lot of these things all on our own. Now you could also be looking to get into the space and want to know what it's like working on connected products and what it takes to get them out into the world, well you're in luck. Our guest in this episode is Matt Negaard. He's been involved in sales and business development roles, product development, led entire teams and he doesn't hold back in sharing what he's learned as a product owner within IOT and the industrial internet of things. This guy's traveled the world toured massive industrial plants and factory floors, assembly facilities, agriculture, operations, and deployed condition monitoring sensors in places you never thought of and he's offered to share his time, his stories and his thought process for other IOT professionals that could benefit from his experience. We cover a number of topics in this conversation. Here's some examples. What are the topics that have executives hanging on every word what's motivating global manufacturing companies to invest in IOT. Who are the invaluable insiders for getting a pilot or a lighthouse project approved? An inside look into the enterprise buyer's journey and what you need to do to earn that big project. Because the secret is you don't get a half the big one on your first goal around how to bring it over to your side. We talk about smart garage doors and how they solved a multi-million dollar problem for another industry, but they just don't know it yet. And what it's like collaborating with operators and operations teams to build the business case for executive leadership teams. That's a lot, right? You may need to hit pause several times and take some breaks over the next hour of this conversation. This episode is brought to you by Soracom.
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Ryan:Signing up for an operator count takes less than a minute. And now onto the interview. Matt you've spent a lot of time on both sides of the fence, both as the business. Stakeholder and also as a technical stakeholder. How often do you see that being unique to getting to sit on both sides of that fence?
Matt:I don't know, Ryan, if I see it very often in my role, I migrated up through business development into, like you said, product ownership. portfolio of IOT products. But what we've both known over the years, People that help us the most are really good solution architects. And I think that what got me to where I'm at is that I moved from business development over to this role, but playing a bit of that solution architect role in the middle picking and choosing and helping people put together the pieces of IOT products and, and you know, those people are important. I think that's where I found myself. Excelling not to have an engineering degree, but, knowing a lot of those piece part components and then get into me where I've done product ownership as well.
Ryan:I think that's where you and I both see eye to eye in many ways is understanding that technical requirements inherently come with unspoken business requirements, especially when it's not just cost. It's that total life cycle approach, the total cost of ownership share this meets our technical requirement, but is it going to meet our long-term goals? is this what we want to bring into the market to represent our brand? and it, it reinforces that IOT is a team sport. So you mentioned. There's the idea of solutions architecture or fulfilling that role. Talk to me about where you saw the need to step in, especially in connected products, in this capacity.
Matt:there's a lot of areas that were unknown and the early stages. And it was, unfortunately, sometimes a build scenario when you didn't really need or shouldn't. but as. That things evolved and changed over time. As people got attracted to this space, namely very large companies like Amazon and Microsoft and filled in a lot of those gaps. So it quickly became all right, let's find the right solutions that exist and put them together because as we know in this environment right now, speed to market or speed to test speed, to try and, put something out there and get a response from the stakeholders that we talked about that's most important. and where I needed to step in is try and peel back a little bit, the temptation to want to build everything. And like you said, get a lot of trusted people together to do a good thing.
Ryan:As a product owner you've had teams focus on creating value. I'd like to talk about that idea of the anatomy of an IOT project and those different primary components. so what do you see as those primary moving parts You described them as, sometimes it's that build by partner or, you don't want to have to build everything.
Matt:the key thing is when you're focused on creating value, What do people really want to buy? So how do you get that? you can go ask people that never had a connected product, what they want. But I think that what we've shown is that nine times out of 10, what they really think they want, they don't want, and the data shows them something else. what we've always talked about is don't start out, trying to create the perfect product, speed to market, and that. Coming in for those different players. And then, understand the main components, are pretty understood. I think the most challenging one is not the delivery of data anymore. It's understanding what is your customer? What do they want for data? Because like you said, sensors are commoditized pathways to the internet are pretty well commoditized. Gateway devices, all those systems, are pretty available, but getting to what's most valuable for your customer. And, you know, I think that there's definitely some mature things in the industry that we've found that know exactly what they want, but, for somebody who's never had a connected product before, that's, that's sometimes a challenge.
Ryan:So you've been in a lot of boardrooms, a lot of factory floors. what are some of the conversations? What are they asking for when you go and listening versus pitching a solution? What are the symptoms? What are the things that
Matt:they want? they want lower labor, like everybody right now. it's tight. So as much automation as possible, instant access to data, you're not sending field teams out, boots on the ground all the time. And of course doing things only when they're needed to. but a lot of it is facilitated. A reduction in labor. the biggest challenge, as we know, is cultural change. Making sure that when you deliver something, that's going to give them some inherent benefits, At the get-go, and not be too hard to digest because, you also have to fight a bit of cultural change as well. when you're talking about people to do their job in a different way, because now they have the access to this data.
Ryan:walk me through some examples of types of situations you've been in, where is it that people leaned in? what were the conversations where they were listening to every word you had to say,
Matt:yeah. When you're wa when you walk into a facility that like, let's just say for predictive maintenance or condition monitoring, everybody's maintenance department is maxed out. And tasked out. And, why things break usually is because the maintenance people, I have so many other jobs, they haven't done the routine things or. You changing the oil every 5,000 miles, things like that. And so when you walk in and you're talking about eliminating their jobs, how you can transform their jobs, those scenarios where you, then you have access to data. And, without having to do certain aspects of the job, which they don't really want to do, usually more routine anyway, and have them focus on, doing specific things. That's the. When the green light goes on and you get access to investment in funds, those kinds of conversations generally start. Yeah. Mid-level management and then they get access to enough money to get something out there, to prove a point and really make it stick. And then they can walk up to the boardroom instead of asking for a hundred K they can ask for a few million dollars. And usually it gets approved because they have proven value in a very short period of time. That's one of the critical things we always saw is that they're looking to prove some value and nail some things down that have real dollar signs attached to them. And then they can go now. Things at scale, that as it relates to IOT and industry 4.0, that industry of predictive maintenance and condition monitoring is one of the most mature things. I think that it's out in the market today from an IOT perspective, there is millions of sensors on manufacturing equipment telling us the health and wellness of what they're doing.
Ryan:that's that's interesting how you talk about that buying process where it's incremental. It's not. You finally convinced them and then they, yeah, they're all in, in my experience, it's no different in professional services, or certain product sales that you've got to win over somebody who it's, you, they directly see what's in it for them and they get that first small wins. So they'll give you a chance. go ahead and just prove it to me that it works or me and my immediate boss. And then there's usually a second opportunity to go in and do it a second time, just to make sure that the results on the first project or pilot or prototype, whatever it is that it wasn't a false positive. And at that point, it's that third. Time's the charm where, okay. You didn't fool me once you didn't fool me twice. All right. we'll go ahead and let you go through that process. And I've seen that reflected by stage gates as well, like different companies all have different approval processes. What do you do? What do you do about meeting people where they're at in their process?
Matt:I, I was just thinking about, as you talk that through, as we scale this up, there is much different requirements as it relates to those components of IOT that we talked about at that mid-level manager, where I'm trying to prove a point and he's going to spend, like I said, maybe$20,000, the tech stack there is. Limited, but it's functional. It does exactly what it's going to do, but it does it in a way that may not be it approved or OT approved. this guy is going to bring it in, strap it on, get a dashboard and say, look, I can catch these failures now. but then when you talked about are, as we're going to scale up, so does. The requirements for your tech stack, all of a sudden, I need to be it approved. they want access to the data. I have to do it within a certain umbrella. And, so when you let you totally stage gates or that the conversations that you have, you're going to have different conversations at every stage. And. More complex. Now, what was your question? Cause I think that's what the band, actually, my brain was going. When you asked about.
Ryan:how do you navigate that? How do you meet them? Where they're
Matt:at? you, you get a lot of mid-level managers to chuckle. When you say it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. And they're like, yeah, I agree. I agree. But then when we get up to those second or third stages, when they say, all right, now, we're going to go ask for money. A lot of. how do you navigate it? You're having, you're going along with these managers to help them tell the story. and it's the story walked around, you know, the savings that they're having, but then you have to navigate the conversation with it professionals to make sure your tech stack. Secure and in the way that they want it, like I said, they might want to fold them access to that data, to one of their systems that's already dominant within their corporation. And, it's good, because you're, getting connected with. Their trade names and the organization. It's also taking more time and money to that every, and you navigate that, by, I don't know, having done that conversation a lot of times before and knowing, the questions that they're going to ask and, and you have. response ready for them. And you'll get some questions that you haven't heard before, but, it's, it's experience. And I think that's the best way that I can put it.
Ryan:what are the questions that you are just, you go into product teams, say we need to be ready to answer the following questions. What, so the what are examples of those
Matt:questions? CEO, they're always going to want some form of calculated ROI. What is time to return on my investment? And then how is it going to make me future profitable? Those are financial questions. So you're going to have to answer it. product owners will have to answer to putting their competence behind whatever components our vendors are going to come and help them out. And then if you look at it, it ranges it sometimes in the organization. we'll. I just have a conversation and bless you other times, you're going to get a 500 line Excel spreadsheet that you have to fill out as well. So that range. Widely, it conversations generally want to see a system architecture and know where the data is going to be and where it's going to be housed. those you're dealing with the board of the staff, and then you're gonna talk with engineering. it depends on how the product is being built, but obviously engineering as a stakeholder here too. And the questions are pretty. Oh from all of them, like I said, it's financials, a lot of security, a lot of domain questions. modern software stacks and device management is a big thing. All right. I don't care. I have million devices out in the field, but I don't talk to them today. When you start talking to devices and understanding what your fleet is, that's a really big component as well.
Ryan:I'd love to, I'd love
Matt:are questions.
Ryan:I'd love to come back around to that fleet side of things. But I think you bringing up an interesting point because you've got IT, which is talking about the data, where does it go? But they're also talking about security. You're going to have all of the people in the middle of how does this make my job better? And then you get the CEO, CIO, whomever it might be is asking for the return on investment scenario, but it's not. Cost versus cost savings or efficiency or reduced labor asking for money or not even money asking for time to do a pilot use as resources, which costs money and that scaling, my experiences that ask it's not just, Hey, we're gonna send some, 200 units out, do a demo. That's technicians that service people, it's taking people off the line to do something it's not free, even if the devices were free. And so the idea of a total cost of ownership isn't even after the purchase, it's even upfront, what is the type of work that we need to do? Get you in to get you up and running. And then there's all of the other considerations down the road. So this brings up an important point that I find is selling into a company means that you are articulate enough to talk about the resources that you would need. the number of people that would be involved, the number of people that don't need to be involved because of technology, right? Total cost of ownership. Isn't about you as a product company, just adding more people. But the only way to address those things is to know the customer, their situation and anticipate it, and, automate the jobs that they didn't want to have to hire for. Taking on connected products. seems now I need new skillsets on my staff just to babysit data that we didn't have before or data scientists or someone to manage a fleet of devices. Yeah. Especially if you're talking about a lot of devices. I'm interested in hearing your experiences as someone who has built products from the prototype level. All the way to building a mature product that is adopted by fortune 100 companies. And sometimes that span of time is only within a year or two, in that evolution. is it that you find yourself potentially getting burned in that process? Where is it that you find the most friction? Navigating those two worlds going from idea to finding a lighthouse customer
Matt:Well,
Ryan:then, being a victim of your own success.
Matt:yeah, you talked about, it'd be there's this ends of the spectrum with fortune 500 companies and 500 person companies. And, they have the same problems, but maybe just in different ways. Right. I remember when. I was working through a network and the owner of one of the companies that makes, all, most, all of the automatic, external defibrillator boxes and campuses and universities and hospitals, things like that. And he had this idea that he wanted to connect them all and get. messages back to those different institutions when somebody had access to AED box. Great idea. And I was pretty excited about this and it's a Minnesota company. So I went down and visited them and we were talking through technology, but then I said, all right, explain to me your business plan here. And, he said that we're going to work away way through the system. And I said, all right, w what you just said, what's your support staff. And he only had one. person that took phone calls, for technical support because they're AED boxes, right? is it a hinge or a handle? It's what's wrong with it? And, he said, she, or he will take all the calls for this. And I said, wait a second. You're going to connect thousands of boxes through cellular radio. And have them some SMS as back to individuals at front desks, we're going to create a system for this, and you're going to have one person answering those phone calls. And, the light bulb went off. It's oh gosh, I'm building a wholly different business here. Aren't I? I said, yes, you're building a totally different business. So you can realize that in that kind of an organization or at a fortune 500 level, sometimes they realize that what we're really building here is a whole different business. I've, we've had experience in that with a large billion dollar companies that are building out a product, but again, that product is sold through distributors. They don't even have contact to their customers. And all of a sudden this thing comes full circle and, it really that's where you can really stumble is not understanding. Depth and breadth to your clients and how it's going to affect the intermediaries. And what does that mean now that you're receiving data from an customers that you never knew? those, I think that's a big thing that we stumbled in the past and it's created a lot of disillusionment around the IOT, but maybe if they've done it different or a smarter way to start it, it would have gone better, but they didn't, people just threw a lot of mud at the wall. So
Ryan:let's do a thought exercise for a moment. And I'd like you to put yourself into the shoes of URA, a high-end consultant, European, given a big pile of money to just speak the truth to someone. And they really want to be. connected, it a condition monitoring device. It's going to be serving audiences that are inside four walls and remote locations. What are the pieces of advice, given your considerable experience, building products of wireless types and wired types and all of these things. What are the do's and don'ts that you want to just get out there right up.
Matt:don't invite everybody from the company into one. To start. And, I would say you go around and you survey the top managers within the organization and ask them, like again, what keeps you up at night? But I usually say what's most painful for you within your job. what's the hardest. To do rather than what keeps you up at night. And, and you find other things where you can really help individuals in the organization. And then you go do those on a small scale and you do a number of pilots, and it takes some money, but you do those and prove a point and get a buy-in from not just your mid-level on the organization, but you could buy them. Beneath too, to support it, to want to live it and install it and champion it. and then you have a base to expand on, with wherever you want to go with the technology within your four walls. but that's, to me, that's probably number one. And then, get some outside counsel, rarely do organization. That, don't build these kinds of products, have the complete skill set. They usually have great people and you bring it up to the table, but they there's a lot of gap filling that has to happen either with vendors or, some paid people to come in and help you with those areas amount of, trying to solicit and go out and hire a bunch of people. But sometimes people can do that as well, but there's so much competition out there and so many good resources to come in and help you with that. you find those people right away that you can trust. And, then third is, look, do look long-term where do you really see it fit with the organization? Is it a true natural part of. Where you're going. they turn GE into a software company and where are they at a, was that the right direction for them to go? Probably not. Now everybody would say that. you don't go overboard, as we, both of us, Ryan, I've seen the strong desire to get into the SaaS. Revenue or hardware as a service or whatever the service you want to call it. but don't swing the pendulum too hard, be true to who you are and what you do. you said
Ryan:don't go overboard. what do you need to own and when right. Cause I'm pretty certain that answer changes depending on where you're at in that cycle. So what are the things that you need to own from the. And what are the things that you would want to own later? Do you have any examples of skill sets or tech stacks or things that you found to be a natural thing to own upfront and things that you could take in house
Matt:later on I, talent is one thing. I think that add, even if you can contract out the whole development, at some point, you're going to need to bring key talent in, to support those components that you've put together, from a hardware to even, you know, things like dev ops or, those type of things. You, you have to bring in house at some point, in terms of that actual tech stack, what you need to own. if you're, I would suggest at some point, when you're bringing in. Communications to your hardware that never communicated before. You're probably going to lean on, things that are embedded into your product, but I think it's a long-term you're going to find those things embedded into your product. I don't think that you need to own software throughout the tech stack anymore. It doesn't seem to me that with everything out there, even platform choices to give you a lot of functionality and flexibility in what they're bolting on to some of the really big software providers out there as well. Um, ownership that's a spurious word too, right? When you think about ownership, You're releasing space everywhere. And what do you really own anymore to that degree, other than hardware and talent? from that perspective and the way where the software world is going.
Ryan:so Matt let's pretend we're starting up a little company here. I can tell you where the talent or the head count that I would want internally is the person who has done the job. And felt the personal pain of managing whatever it is that's being done. So who is it that can speak to the user or the buyer? I don't say customer, I say customer very lightly because customers are usually in two camps. Their customer could be user or a buyer and outside of B2C, it's rarely the same person. we want to know. Who the buyers are and who the users are and have some level of empathy, right? So it's hard to buy empathy. there's going to be a product owner or someone who understands the various moving pieces, or at least can coordinate those moving pieces, whether they're vendors or whatnot. You've seen, I've seen, I've personally seen like the module on, are they the modules that are put on a boards? those are all pre-baked gateways are pre-baked sensors are pre-baked. these things are kitted and bundled is the value in that device. postulate, no, the device itself is just a bunch of components that have been integrated or assembled and have some level of interoperability with other decisions that need to be made. So I guess, I'd be pushing for someone that's going to own some level of support upfront right. For field trials for the prototype. So maybe a technical lead of some kind.
Matt:Yeah. You need to have a high-functioning technical lead in that role because somebody knows none of those people have a background experience in that company. Technical products to this degree. and somebody, and you're not just looking at one piece of equipment now you're looking at the whole tech stack, right? So who are you going to hold accountable? That technical person has to know a lot of different moving parts. Like you said, But
Ryan:I probably could, I could probably farm that out as well. I know I've worked with some design houses where they're like, they can on my behalf, if I've got more money than time, I could farm that out as well. As long as I can understand the business case, someone else.
Matt:you could. other people's work. Yes, you could. You want somebody that, has a background and definitely experienced in your product and it's more dedicated to you, but yeah, you can farm that out. Yeah. Yeah. You'd mentioned
Ryan:software and it's crazy how I think about software these days than I did early on thinking. software is the truly unique. You're going to really want to own that internally, but you said something that I think resonates more than ever is what is the company's commitment to digital transformation? Is this something you actually want to own or is it just the result that you want to own or the market slice?
Matt:Yeah, I think that hopefully corporations are getting smarter about that. but over time, what we've seen in the last 10 years that there's been a lot of money spent, in places. No, th the most common thing when I arrived, you said when you entered the boardroom or the panel at a client, and you say, what do we want to do when somebody yells out, let's build an app. You'd say why? And that, that's almost a cartoon right now. And, but we've been, I've been directly involved in some of those conversations. So you, that is really a truly understood. They're going, what are they trying to get out of it? Long-term and, or is it just headlines? And I think that what we're seeing is a that's maturing I've I would say honestly, and objectively in the past three years, definitely the terms of competence that I have projects in executing and building and deploying and having commercial success is a lot more than it was. Seven or eight years ago.
Ryan:can you walk into a room and get a read for the room and know whether someone will be successful or not just from talking to the people and the attitudes?
Matt:I think that. if you talk about success as a barometer, I think what I would change it to is say that I can understand if something's going to be more of a science experiment where we're really at the early stages of testing a hypothesis, or if I can walk in and say, all right, listen. They're getting ready. They understand they've got some background data, they've done a mature conversation. Right. So if we look at the scale of where do you start, where do you end? I say, what I would say is that I'm entering rooms where people are at a much more mature. Of the conversation rather than what we were working on early on, which was a lot of science experiments now, to their degree level of success. Yeah. I'd think I'd have my own personal feeling on that, but, you're willing to explore right. And see what the data's going to bring.
Ryan:I'm hearing that the size of the business problem. Is probably equivalent to the depth of the effort that these people have been putting into things, right? Whether it's, we're calling it digital transformation or not. If they see it as a strategic imperative at their company to make this decision, they'll have done their homework before they even talk to you. If you're coming in from the outside,
Matt:Oh, yeah. Yeah. there. Yeah. Companies, like I said, early on that were reading headlines. Like I got to get in touch with somebody. I gotta Google IOT and call somebody or they've gone back and said, all right, these are problems, the major issues in the organizations. And here's what we can actually address with IOT. And here's where we're going to start exploring, or I have explored and are ready to really solve these very specific problems that we have. And, there might be further definition of how they're going to do that, but, they really know that they've done their homework a bit more.
Ryan:one of the things that I see is thinking about fast followers, but in something like IOT, I really don't believe that. Such a thing as a fast follower. So for example, you go into the same group, they've been doing a bunch of their homework. as a way of preparing, going online, looking at their competitors, looking at other people in the space and looking at how many of their competitors already have connected part products that are in the market. Are there case studies, are they actively selling it or does it still seem like an announcement that we're getting into it? Because if they have product. By the time you're talking to that company that wants to be a fast follower or a new entrant they're 18 months behind already, right? Their competitor has put in that 18 months of doing some prototypes, bringing in a couple of pieces of hardware, maybe bringing in a couple of more specialists. Farming out the parts that they don't need to, they probably have a lighthouse customer. They've done some initial testing, proven out the business value. And now they're going from managing five devices to 500 or 50 to 50,000, it's just that whole economy of scale. And there's a lot of learnings that go on in between there. To enter into the market. It's not a matter of just doing the same thing Or going in and then failing. So this is a serious brand discussion at this point, right? if you're going to enter in, how important is it that you get this right. And how much of the nut do you want to own in order to gain speed to results.
Matt:that's true. And you, so what you're saying is if there's a person that's looking right and saying that. No that happened. I got to get there or did they want to say, all right, what have we learned and where they're going? I did, I need to start developing where they're going. And, and, but then you got to figure out where is it that they're going, We have the connected garage doors and that hasn't has an app. it that's still where it's at because there was never anywhere else for it. And, and it still has a low level of utility. There's not a lot of people that really do the app, as a percentage of garage owners. but in industry, there is definitely areas of where things have come online and then they have scaled. And generally where we see most of that happening is not necessarily on the hardware. It's on the software and things. So where am I going to take this data and make it meaningful? Who else can use the data? How can I farm it out? And so the idea is, all right, if you're going to be a fast follower, then take whatever hardware is out there and try and do what's next. Where is this market really going to take?
Ryan:That whole idea of the connected garage door always makes me think about I've had two of them now and the value has never been to take out my phone and open and close my garage. For me as a consumer, the value is I always wake up in the middle of the night. Did I leave the garage door open? And I can look at my app and it shows the icon of opened or closed. And if I left it open, I can hit the button or I could set the notification that pushes a notification saying, Hey, your door has been open for more than an number of minutes. 30 minutes, 60 minutes. It's still. And it can be a reminder to, oh, I don't want to leave that open all day long because it's winter or because of theft or whatever the, the reasons might be. And sometimes that's lost on a lot of us that the initial idea, isn't always a direct replacement. it wasn't a replacement for the remote control that sits in our car.
Matt:what you're saying is we missed an opportunity because if we would have developed the obsessive compulsive app and aggregated data from our, furnace, our stove, our door, our garage door, then we solved the problem.
Ryan:is it, what you think about that? if we're actually tying into HVAC and we're looking at, maybe getting a rebates through the energy program for a tax deduction, we would be selling it instead to car washes.
Matt:Yes. Yeah. You data, that's where can the data go and lead you to, better information, better experience for your customers? How do they buy more from us? their experience with us. So yeah, coming back home, it's like, all right, let's, quickly evolve into getting there because the people that have successfully done phase one are already getting the information they need from an installed user base to be working against that future strategy. you've got to get there.
Ryan:Matt, this is, this has been a good little discussion, just talking in and around some of the nuances of. It's not just a matter of building the thing or staffing all the way up and then trying to slog through it on your own, but it is a approach that takes steps and it starting small proving things out value of software is that it can change over time.
Matt:and it's funny, right? I love technology and I love vendors and I love all the components and the communication protocols, and I've got enough knowledge to be dangerous about all of that. And that's where it's really fun. But. We don't get to do any of that, unless we're working on things that solve real problems, the conversation, and a product ownership or a business development role that I find myself in is peeling back to that a lot of times. But I do love the underlying technology that brings it all together.
Ryan:I'd like to take a moment to reflect on a previous conversation that we had in our few remaining minutes here. and we were talking about your experience in deploying a cellular based device and, overcoming it. now first and foremost, going from a wifi or hired hardwired connection, adding in cellular, what was the reaction from it?
Matt:from most it organizations, the reaction was relief. So they have to manage one more vendor coming in on a network, you know, actually having to come in and wire, new connections for gateways in and, you know, powered solutions that, that to them, was more undesirable than, us saying, Hey, you can drop a cellular radio. If it's green, you're online. And if it's not, it's our problem. But, that was a lot more desirable and cellular seen as a very secure technology. as long as you meet some certain approvals, but no, I never involved a lot of. Objections from it over cellular again, like what we had said you wanted to come back to, and if we do it just for a second, that's where fleet management came in really well, because all they want to know, because they understand that on their own network, all they want is an ability to quickly see, alright, where's all my devices. And are they online? Do they have the latest software? and. what's their status. And so device management from an it perspective was also very important. So as long as you had some ability for them to know, where and how their fleet of own devices was working.
Ryan:that's great. One of the things you'd mentioned in the previous conversation was around the ability to technical support issues. when someone says my devices broke, you'd mentioned that, debugging at five devices. No problem versus 5,000 and the huge difference that played into some of the decisions that you made in, not having an ability to manage that many Sims or that many devices.
Matt:the, I T. A, perspective. any organization who's managing a fleet of devices, like I said before, you want to limit the amount of labor that you have involved. you want to limit the amount of boots on the ground and, for physically connected devices, essentially know a lot of times it require boots on the ground, but when. Remote and cellular you're usually in a lot of remote places. that was in the backend of factories that were making glass were also out in pistachio fields and the central valley. That's when it's very important to, understand how you can scale to manage. 500 pumps that are remote in the field and their awareness of what their status is. and when you're managing five devices, it's a great start. just to make sure you don't break anything and leave anybody hanging because that's a long trip. And then this scale, as long as you have a good part, or vendor, that has a mature platform. You don't really need to worry about scale much anymore, you got, punched in the chest a lot, I think six, seven years ago, because a lot of things weren't built at scale, but these kinds of technologies, there's a lot of good providers of people that are doing device management at scale. And, they've got great tools that you can use. So you lean on them rather than trying to build something on your own.
Ryan:Knowing that most cellular providers are just antiquated data resellers, it's just selling you bandwidth. Here's a SIM here's some bandwidth. Go to town, right? but I'd like to think about that idea of scale at five devices. Bandwidth is exactly what you might need. Assuming, you've got all of the tools that you need to build out. The infrastructure you'd mentioned doing it all over again was once the question I'd asked you, and you said there were three things that you would do all over again on some of these projects, you said use a pre-certified model. Used, AWS or a modern infrastructure of some kind, and you would have built a modern front end interface of those things. Those are all fairy, different pieces. One of them is hardware, one of them software. And one of them is data hosting. You touched on all of the three big moving pieces, like what was the biggest pain and why.
Matt:the biggest pain in that scenario is working for traditional hardware company and then hiring all the engineers to build all those different components for the organization. And. That was not natural or Jermaine, I think, in our business. So it would have been better in certain pieces of the, like we talked about to contract out things that you don't need to do. And we've experienced those in the past. you could do it, but you don't need to do it and you're not getting any inherent benefit and what's the total cost of ownership. And I would say that, lessons learned from that would be to sit at a higher level and figuring out what we really need to own and build, but also, things that we didn't think about in there that came back to bite us was that all of a sudden, all of our customers starting to ask about device management, we didn't have an answer. That was something that we were going to have to build. those are the things that we could have thought about
Ryan:And is that they were asking for basically fleet management.
Matt:At scale.
Ryan:what were some of the situations? Was it, turning them on and off moving them? what were type, what were the common requests you're getting on that fleet management side?
Matt:the kind of request, I think our, we talked about our buyers and users, And it's the users, from mainly from an it perspective or a support perspective, you know? Alright, who does Joe? Who's on the floor. I'm not getting updates about the health of his equipment call, because there's a very complex system of wireless sensors to a gateway going to a cloud and me not getting my dashboard. yeah. Who are you going to call? And he doesn't know, so he needs to call one person. So we need to have that one person. And then the rest of the team support him. And, that's a complex architecture in terms of what are those, who do you draw the lines to and, customer support and our support.
Ryan:The thing is who's got permissions, right? Like I always think about that support challenge is when you're talking about being an original equipment manufacturer, You're probably, or maybe selling to a distributor or a reseller who they may be selling it to a corporate group that corporate group deploys it across regional groups. And do you give a service technician, the ability to manage and monitor every device, or just the devices within their purview? do you have, what level of permissions are they going to get? Fleet management is tricky because unless it's built specifically for a very specific use case for very specific corporate structure. It's almost hard to anticipate if, especially if you're building on your own, being, having the ability to easily make those changes on the fly
Matt:as well. Yeah. When did my device last report. And, and then I have, devices that go down for four days and want to send up an immense amount of data. How do you manage that as well? And then do users and stakeholders care about. Alerts that built up over the last week or so there. Yeah. You, once you break down the anatomy of it gets really highly complex. because again, we have to make sure we're giving the best relevant data, to get a good experience. Otherwise, culturally people are not going to want to use or pay attention to the information and that's not where you need to see IOT go. You need to see it highly utilized data.
Ryan:and that's an example, just like the fleet management side, you could spend a significant amount of engineering solving. Before you even get to put things into the field and even get into the hands of users. So when you're running those first five or 50 devices, do you really need to have all of those advanced fleet management controls from the get go,
Matt:right? No, you need to get you. You need to sign up with somebody that doesn't say, Hey, sorry, but you're going to have to buy this big half million dollar platform. You want to start that? Pitch then you say, okay, great. Why don't you come back to me in a year when I've tested this with somebody that's going to charge me$5,000, So like you said, it's different requirements at different scales. the best vendors in my history are meeting you at those different points and giving you packages, tool sets, and ability to do that, at a commensurate cost for the level of effort that you're putting in.
Ryan:Which is going to change over time, right? I think there's a certain level of technical debt as you go from connected product to connected product line, to connected ecosystem. To next thing I know you're a durable goods company that is now a digital company that happens to make durable goods or puts your technology into other people's durable goods. You know that's a whole scale that changes. And once you're getting into that connected product line and beyond on a, as for ours, like an organizational journey, you're going to want to be rolling your own API APIs. You want to build your own fleet management consoles, but do you want to reinvent the infrastructure that manages those pieces? if you can have a vendor that doesn't tie you to their highly opinionated workflow, APIs that your team can now use. You can get as complicated as you want, but early on, that's the opposite of what you're looking for. So I find the whole vendor selection process in IOT. To be hard, especially when I've sat in those rooms where they're like, and here's our platform licensing. It's a half million dollars or 50 grand and that's up front. And I don't even have any devices in the field yet. I don't even know if I can make money with this thing. have you seen any changes? You said, I mean, we've both been in this since. It was, you know, costs the sky's the limit, sign me up here's a bunch of money to like, it's pretty flexible now. Like I'm seeing more pay as you go or just pay per use or, like a series of tools that you can use to find out. Can I make money with this?
Matt:Yeah, I think so, Ryan. five years ago, people were building out these component, building blocks as for IOT on the big platforms. Microsoft's IOT hub, or AWS has all the things that they built around it, but it was pretty complex early on too. it wasn't just, you know, simple to stitch all of those things together. They all required coordination. There are now, on top of each of those platforms, those connections are internal to their solutions. So as long as you can get data in this door here, and it's not hard, and there's a lot of hardware providers that will provide a stream of data. Like which one do you want? Okay. We'll pick that one. I can push data through, to that platform. And now they're coming up with quick things on the front end of their platforms to visualize that data dashboard builders, the really easy components that were there before, but I think you had to hunt and Peck for them. And there was smaller. ISP is independent software vendors that were doing those different things. They still required some stitching, some custom code. but I'm thinking, you know, what, what your asks that it's ability to test a hypothesis now is really simple. So if somebody's coming in, you're saying, Hey, can we just prove this out, put it in our AWS space and get a dashboard. And if they want to charge you a half million dollars for that, it should take them a week. Right? So, um, you know, choose wisely and. That, I think that ability now is what we needed to five years ago for the pace of testing against the market space. And IOT was going.
Ryan:Final question, Matt, someone is wanting to get in there. They're bending metal, making things they're not connected. What is the one piece of advice that you would give to anyone thinking about connecting their thing and creating value in this world?
Matt:one, that's One. one piece of advice. I think that. I always, I mean, I'm, it's the hard question for me to answer, right? Because I'm drawn to the technology. So like, all right, you want to do this, you want to do this, but you really need to understand what the value of your data is. And as we know you like to say, this is the data that I think that is most valuable in my business or for my customers or for my operations. And, And it's going to change a little bit in terms of why you think that value is, but I'd say the thing is the most important thing is you're going to do this, right? You're talking about it. You're going to do it. You're going to talk to everybody about why it's important. I would always go back to start with a small effort, do it quickly and, be able to iterate fast. You don't make any big decisions. platforms or technologies or vendor, just get out there and do it. Cause you can do it quickly and you need to do that before you bring any large commercial scale product out. when you walk into that, boardroom already have that position as we're doing this, right. We're all talking about it, but we're going to start small, not like, all right. Um, let's, let's draft out the final plan. Corporate headquarters. No, start with, you're going to start in the garage and then you're going to work your way there.
Ryan:So I'm hearing, there's a couple of vectors. when pulling all the pieces together, the goal is to move as fast as possible and get validation. And I'm hearing two smart vectors. The first one is in evaluating what your options are. What's going to give me speed. But the second one that I'd argue is, how locked in am I with that first decision? is there an escape patch, right? can I grow with that decision? Will that decision, you know, like, uh, AWS, uh, you know, can start as just a big repository of data. Data can just go there into the cloud. Right? You can use maybe some of the tools, there's intermediary things. Now I'm not showing that everyone should go AWS. Did someone already build a product that does 90% of what you need, and you're just putting on your type of sensors or you're changing the names of how it's reporting a combination, right? The, putting the emphasis on the combination of data sets. So I bet you could prove out a whole lot of your things, especially in condition monitoring without ever having to build a thing and just components that already exist.
Matt:Oh, yeah, we did a lot of validation with manufactured data. We knew what we were going to get off. but we manufactured the data and built out that user experience that way. and so I, yeah, I would agree with that for sure.
Ryan:Matt. Thanks for your time. This has been. do it again. And maybe next time we go over some of the other things we talked about in a previous conversation, around where some of your biggest fights were
Matt:My biggest, what we're
Ryan:the biggest fights and underestimations, but we'll save that for another conversation.
Matt:Yeah. I love those conversations.
Ryan:thank you again and take care, Matt.
Matt:Yep. Sounds good. Thank you. Have a good day. You too.