Much of my understanding of the world involves tubes. Some examples of essential tubing:

• Gastrointestinal tract (open-air nutrient extraction tube)

• Circulatory system

• Electrical grid

• Sewage system

• The internet

All tubing at some point is limited by capacity. Capacity is determined by variables like smoothness, size, and straightness, combined with the viscosity of what’s flowing through it. Choose your piped material (blood, electrons, poop) and update the analogy accordingly!

With tubing, we’re always looking for opportunities to maximize flow. More than a yogic aspiration, maximal flow moves the most content with the least effort, reducing energy needed as well as wear-and-tear. Moving electrons along a power lines is no different.

Most of my memories of high-tension power lines are associated with mountain biking in the tidy right-of-ways beneath them. Near our home in Albuquerque, I’ve had my eye on a gnarly power line trail in the East Mountain area. It’s gnarly because it just goes straight up the mountain, topography be damned. As a former landscape architect, the lines always had a jarring, dissonant quality against their surroundings. Mountain ranges, streams, canyons—power lines are like honey badgers: they don’t care. They cut an engineered swath across a landscape filled with otherwise organic shapes and contours.

Although I generally view them as a visual blight, I get it: it’s easier to build and maintain something straight, accessible and visible, so we’re not going back. Hence, I like the idea of using IoT technology to more fully achieve capacity for infrastructure that exists. To keep up with the increasing demand for electricity, we’re going to need to pull every efficiency lever we can find!

The balls monitor the temperature of the power lines. Temperature is important. All things have a desired temperature range in which they run smoothly/efficiently. Generally speaking, heat is an adversary to electrons. Electrons, like my friend Dave, run well when its cold and get grumpy (and slow) when overheated. The colder the conductor temperature, the higher volume of electrons that flow through the material.

The company that makes the balls is named Heimdall, which is the name of a mythological Norse Watchman. In this case, of course, they are watching the temperature.

Side note: I don’t know how many Scandinavian companies you interacted with, but they love they seem to share a passion for naming products based on mythological figures. Go figure.

In any case, the moderm incarnation of Heimdall is a bit more vanilla. Gone are the alpenhorns and rainbows, and in their place: a stainless steel ball:

Plus, drones, obviously. In addition to signaling technological prowess, these drones actually serve an essential purpose of installing the balls efficiently.

In any case, keep your eyes cast towards the sky for balls on a power line near you soon. Hopefully this technology, combined with other incremental gains in efficiency can prevent additional power lines from being constructed.

I recently attended a panel discussion on product management that included Paul Canetti, Professor of Business at Columbia University. He was asked a question by the Ricki Singh, the McKinsey moderator. She asked “What differentiates the top 1% of product managers? Paul’s answer: “Taste. You can have all the data and the raw ingredients, but having the intuition to be in line with what the market wants…that’s taste.”

A lightbulb went off, and I realized that Paul’s “taste” was part of what I consider a “good eye”.

Symbolic meaning

I am intrigued by the phase “good eye” in part because the symbolic meaning of the 👁️ runs deep. It has appeared for millennia in religious, occult, and spiritual art. It’s at the top of the pyramid on the dollar bill. It represents Sauron’s all-seeing and all-knowing gaze in Middle Earth.

It is also on your forehead——your Third Eye that is. Understood as a bridge between the spiritual and physical world, it is said to represent a higher state of consciousness. 

The symbolism of the eye is potent. Here are some other attributes associated with the eye:

• Keen eyesight or visual accuracy. Excellent vision and observational skills, such as in finding Waldo or seeing subtle texture differences, for example

• Discernment and perceptiveness. Keen judgment and the ability to assess situations quickly and accurately

• Secret knowledge and power. Imagery for the mysterious social organizations the Illuminati and Freemasons feature the Eye of Provenance prominently.

• Generosity and benevolence. The opposite of the Evil Eye, the "good eye" represents goodwill, blessings, and generosity towards others. 

• Window into one’s soul. The idea that studying the physical appearance of the eye can reveal truths about a person’s inner character.

“Good eye” was a term that I heard more in my first career as a landscape architect. It was used when a person had exhibited a combination of careful observation, visual clarity, aesthetic judgment, perceptive discernment, and the ability to identify details others might overlook. It was a bit of a catch-all non-specific compliment. A rough equation might look like:

When I first began thinking about this article, I thought that a good eye meant the ability to sense balance from imbalance, equilibrium from disequilibrium or order from entropy. I still think this is true.

As my thinking evolved, I thought a good eye meant having good judgment in the dimensions of physical, psychological, moral, and aesthetic. I also think this is also true.

But what I think now is that when someone says you have a good eye in XYZ, they are ultimately letting you that they trust you to recognize (and curate or create) things of quality in XYZ. And it is an honor to be trusted.

Back to Product

Back to Product, here are some ways that I apply the idea of a good eye to product management. If the top 1% of product managers have a good eye, then I think they:

• Spot emerging trends in time to develop timely and valuable solutions that are driven by actual underlying value rather than hyped news cycles

• Have the ability to identify different types of red herrings and understand psychological and market insights from them

• Develop accessible ways to visualize complex data that gives it value and insight to a broad audience

• Have a knack for assessing character and finding substantial individuals: customers, partners, contractors, co-workers. 

• Be skilled at the art of helping others reach logical conclusions when presented with supporting evidence

• Are able to rapidly update ideas when presented with new evidence or information

• Overtly or intuitively understanding downstream consequences of decisions; knowing which decisions are consequential and require serious scrutiny and which can be made quickly

With a post on this subject, it’s tempting to end on a pun, but eye promise eye won’t do that. (Groan!)

In college I spent a semester studying in Barcelona. We had an art history professor, who, armed with a gigantic mustache and a slide projector showed us photographs of Moorish architecture like The Alhambra or Grande Mosque. He kept repeating that these were prime examples of “rico diseño hecho con materiales pobres”, which generally translates to “fine design made from cheap materials”. The gist of what he was so impressed with, and wanted us to be impressed with was how something of high value could be created from something of low value through great craftsmanship. The same concept applies to BLE real-time location systems. When designed well, the systems leverage BLE hardware (cheap components) to create high value (accurate location data) through craftsmanship (machine learning algorithm and sensor fusion techniques). 

Most RTLS that use other technologies to determine locations do not share this approach. In contrast, they use hardware that is more expensive, but resolving that data into an accurate location requires much less processing power and time to achieve a high level of accuracy. This is true for RTLS that use infrared (IR) light or ultrasound signal. Because the reach of each of these signal types is constrained by walls, it does not take much compute power to determine whether a tag’s location is inside a room or in the adjacent hall. Of course, using these types of signal technologies has drawbacks as well, such as hardware cost, system complexity, proprietary technology, and restrictions on current or future interoperability. With the difficult decisions posed by these factors, many hospitals have chosen not to adopt a locating technology, yet, as they have been waiting for the “right time”. Many solution seekers believe that the “right time” is when a BLE-based solution becomes available that can meet the high demands of accuracy and responsiveness needed for many clinical use cases. 

With this growing pent-up demand, the arrival of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) in 2011 brought a wave of optimism about the potential for BLE to crack the nut of a low-cost do-all system.

The fundamental challenge in creating a BLE real-time location system has to do with balancing trade offs. Usually fully satisfying one dimension of need (accuracy, timeliness, battery life) comes with unacceptable effects on the other dimensions. So many original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) generally have to make hard decisions about a balance that they believe will be most valuable to their target markets. Many systems have configurations that provide a limited range of flexibility, but the trade offs still exist.

Here are some examples:

• If you want a high level of responsiveness (low latency), such that a location change is recorded quickly when, this has the potential of reducing battery life for both tags and infrastructure to an unacceptable duration.

• If you want a high level of location accuracy, it could require the collection of a significant volume of data, sending it to the cloud, and processing it through an algorithm to achieve a high confidence level. In ter, this results in higher requirements of time, power, and cost to collect, transmit, and process the data.  

In addition to these challenges, BLE can struggle at the most fundamental level: obtaining quality raw data. Because BLE exists in a crowded range of the radio spectrum (2.4 GHZ), the raw data collected about signal strength can be degraded, setting the stage for diminished location accuracy.

Some factors which can affect BLE signals are:

• Signal attenuation (BLE signals can be significantly attenuated by walls, metal objects, people, etc. This makes it hard to maintain a consistent signal strength that correlates well with exact distance from the receiver.

• Multipath propagation: BLE signals often reach the receiver via multiple paths (reflecting off surfaces). This causes unpredictable signal distortions that don't provide a reliable indicator of straight-line distance.

• Environmental dynamics: Movement of people and objects within a building causes constant fluctuations in signal propagation which reduces location accuracy.

• Interference: There may be interference from WiFi, other BLE transmitters, etc. This can skew distance and direction calculations.

But The Alhambra and the Grand Mosque are not great works because plaster was cheap. They are impressive works because tremendous value has been added to a cheap material through craft. In the case of Bluetooth Low Energy, the value add needs to come in the form of advanced algorithms that have the capability of resolving signals into locations with a very, very high level of accuracy. Of course these may happen in conjunction with other advances, such as in battery capacity, or decreased power consumption of radio devices.

Engineers are working on all dimensions of this challenges, but I believe that it's proving to be a more difficult (and more expensive) nut to crack than many hoped for a few years ago. It's only recently that we have achieved a coherent convergence of a low-cost, low-compute and machine learning enabled environment that has allowed a level of performance that covers the majority of use cases in a clinical setting. 

The highway to a full-featured BLE-based RTLS is strewn with broken promises — one does not need to look hard to find disappointed customers or failed proof of concept deployments. However, I think we are getting close to achieving a semblance of balance between the critical dimensions of cost, accuracy, responsiveness, and ease of use that will put this technology within the reach of many organizations.

Or, a new technology may burst onto the scene and leapfrog all of this. We shall see. 

We were sitting in the second row, just feet away from the players, so facial expressions and body movement were integral to the experience. Phones were stowed. I was struck by how analog it felt: a person moving their arm to drag a stick with taut horsehair and dried tree sap across an opposing set of taut strings held by an intricate tree carving. All this to play songs that were imagined hundreds of years ago. It was visceral, and primitive albeit in a refined way—a juxtaposition to my professional day-to-day working intimately with technology like IoT sensors, software code, geospatial analytics, location engines, and virtual meetings. 

The experience got me thinking about other memories I cherish and the extent to which technology is featured (or not).  Playing with my kids, mountain biking with old friends, riding the ski lift on a bluebird day, crisp fall air on my face, laughing with family, feeling proud of a loved one. What struck me was how profoundly absent technology was from these memories. When I tried to find a memory in which technology featured prominently, I could not.

As a person who works in technology, this encapsulates my stance as a product manager (and in fact my work across careers). I’ve always enjoyed working in the background to support worthy goals. Put another way, I’ve never intended for my work to explicitly be the feature of someone who is interacting with it. To me that’s simply not all that interesting compared to other possibilities— and feels a bit narcissistic if I’m being honest. What I’ve always wanted is for my work to be the Best Supporting Actor in the lives of folks who interact with it. I’ve always seen my work as a means to an end, where the end state supports and empowers people to be the best they can be in their professional, family, personal, and civic lives. 

In product, I think this can only be accomplished when solutions are utterly intuitive, terribly valuable, inclusive, and at least somewhat invisible.

As I talked about in New Cool Tools, there is a stage in the maturation of a tool in which it can effectively be taken for granted. This is mostly a blessing, because when something can be taken for granted this means it has reached a certain level of reliability and ubiquity. Using these tools as a solid foundation, people can move up the hierarchy of needs and focus on more sophisticated and complex topics, such as self-actualization, belonging, relationships. 

To me, meeting these higher order needs should be the promise of all technology. If a technology is designed to be the center of our attention (like social media), to me it cannot be inherently designed with the users best interests in mind. It is an energy sink rather than a source. Social media companies are advanced intelligence platforms designed to gather and monetize our interests while masquerading as modern ways to achieve belonging and connectedness. The curtain is starting to be pulled back, and it will take many years for the full extent of the damage to be revealed.

Professionally, I strive to make IoT systems and software Best Supporting Actors. Hardware and software should work in the background to provide information that enables users to spend time on higher order, more valuable things. In healthcare, that can take the shape of nurses spending more time with patients and less time looking for medical equipment. In agriculture, it can look like farmers growing more crops while reducing pesticide use. In manufacturing, it can mean greater productivity with fewer accidents.

So while we continue to leverage powers of technology, let’s remember: 

• Not that matters can or should be measured in metrics

• Technology should serve us, not us it. A good litmus test is how self-important the technology feels

• The real end goals are self-actualization, relationships, and many forms of balance and peace

I come across a good deal of news-of-the-weird type articles about IoT. Some of them seem 

Different use cases require different capabilities, such as communication range and data volumes. Fortunately, there is an ever-widening range of sensors available and software developers continue to specialize applications for new types of sensors as they become more widely available. It is a period of rapid and diverse innovation. Industries that were once reluctant to adopt IoT technology due to complexity and cost are now able to embrace it. I see this as a widespread experimentation period, with the pendulum swinging far in the direction of exploration, as every industry tries to discover an IoT fit that aligns with their most important needs. Many of these experimental endeavors will not create enduring solutions, but some will. The pendulum of experimentation will swing back as each company finds their right balance of IoT penetration.

The pendulum equation is always changing though–as the variables of cost, ease of deployment, battery technology, and general technological capabilities change, the balance of what’s right for them will evolve. I expect it to quickly!

Pendulums, aside, I want to share some interesting and unusual use cases of people using IoT technology on things that are important to them:

1. Sheep Rumen Monitoring - What IoT sensors are used to monitor the stomachs of sheep in real-time. These sensors measure pH levels, temperature, and movement, providing proactive visibility of individuals and herd health issues. This enables early intervention and ensures the well-being of the sheep. Geek out more here

   

2. Ocean Buoy Data for Ship Routing - Real-time buoy data is utilized to develop micro-weather models that include wind and current locations, which have a significant impact on ship efficiency. By updating ship routes in real-time based on this data, IoT technology optimizes ship routing and enhances overall efficiency. Geek out more here

3. Medication detection sensors - Knowing patient adherence to prescription medical can be a source of comfort for loves ones and important data for their doctors. Non-adherence to medications can cause major issues for patients. One solution (in development) is an ingestible sensor that provide real-time feedback on whether a patient is following their prescription. Geek out more here

4. Smart Diapers - RFID chips embedded in diapers can detect moisture and notify parents or caretakers when it's time for a diaper change. This not only enhances convenience but also helps reduce overall diaper usage, resulting in cost savings and environmental benefits.

5. Concrete curing sensors - Since I had other careers in architecture and geotechnical engineering, I have lots of experience with concrete. Most people don’t realize it, but concrete is quite complex, and imperfections in curing can mean that it needs to be replaced, resulting in massive wastes of time and money, and needless additional carbon emissions. Validating the curing process through data provides a high level of assurance that concrete is going to meet expectations. Geek out more here.

This is just a sampler pack to highlight the versatility and impact of IoT technology in unconventional domains. We’re unlocking answers to tough challenges across diverse domains. I sincerely hope that we can discover major efficiencies in both healthcare and climate change.

Where do you think IoT devices will show up next in your life? What bizarre and unexpectedly useful applications have you seen?

A talk by Leslie Witt, Chief Product Officer at Headspace, helped crystallize my thinking. She spoke about her own transition from architecture to product, and how it informs her leadership style, process, and values in insightful ways. Leslie was part of the speakers at 2023 McKinsey Product Academy, a series I continue to enjoy. 

With reflection on the transition, I also feel immense gratitude to the clients, partners, and team members who I’ve had the privilege of working with and learning from in both careers. This post is about my journey and the skills that I carried forward from my career in landscape architecture into my career in product. This post mostly has to do with the transfer of skills. I’ll save most of the personal details for another post when I feel braver.

1. Design thinking

Because I was trained as a landscape architect, design thinking is intrinsic to how I approach problems. I begin with an effort to deeply understand user needs, and then rapidly ideate solutions and iteratively refine concepts with a range of stakeholders. In my work in product, I rely on those same techniques to make sure we’re building things of value by prototyping and testing hypothesis efficiently. My architecture toolkit – problem analysis, participatory charrettes, mockup studies – laid the foundational skills that allow me to integrate user perspectives into tangible products and to build consensus among large and diverse professional teams and stakeholder groups. 

2. Graphic communications

Graphics were my fundamental medium as a landscape architect – I used sketches, diagrams, renderings and physical and digital models to communicate ideas, solve component relationship and hierarchies, and problem-solve at both the macro and micro scale. Distilling complex spatial and organizational relationships into intuitive graphics was crucial for getting buy-in from clients and government agencies to advance complex projects. Technical drawing also requires a keen eye for structuring information into a rapidly understandable and industry-accepted format. In my current work, attention to graphic composition such as structure, line-weight, colors, and text has been valuable in conversations across functions.

Who knew that all the years I spent studying, creating, and marking up drawing sets would help crystallize tools I rely on every day in product?

3. Geospatial understanding

Understanding the lay of the land across all scales was everything in landscape architecture. I needed to understand a project’s coarse dimensions, like latitude, longitude, and general climatic zone, and also site-specific dimensions like aspect, canopy coverage, and micro-climates. While my current work is within buildings, it's still essential to understand the geometry of a space, including building composition and typical movements of the equipment and people within them. This understanding plays into both designing IoT (internet of things) solutions and evaluating emerging technologies. I anticipate that this skill set will be even more valuable as indoor and outdoor location technologies become more seamlessly integrated. 

4. Multidisciplinary team leadership

When I had a firm, nearly every project involved experts across disciplines, such as structural engineers, construction managers, and city officials (to name a few). I often led these multidisciplinary teams – facilitating workshops, building consensus, finding compromise, and reconciling competing priorities. Today, my core competency is to act as the conductor of information across siloed disciplines while maintaining fidelity to the product vision. I find this role thrilling, being a jack of all trades but the master of the one that brings people, ideas, and skills together.

5. Grand vision

Architects have, ahem, a reputation for their Grand Visions. But the Grand Vision serves an important purpose. It’s the North Star that creates a shared value lens to help a cross-functional or multi-disciplinary team make complex decisions over an extended period of time. It’s a banner to fly under, together. It’s a moral beacon. As the director of product at my company, my north star is simple: I want to make the best and most versatile software possible for our customers to provide better patient care and staff working conditions. There are many other stars in the constellation, but they all cascade down from this vision and support it.

6. Planning at broad scale and time dimensions

When I worked on landscape architecture projects, I forced myself to think expansively in terms of scale and time when conceptualizing and executing designs. I needed to consider how my projects would interact with the surrounding context, environment, and community for decades to come. This demands thinking beyond the present and imagining how the projects will be used into the future, while also designing structures at a broad scale to account for access, circulation, and urban connections. This is a juggle of visionary ideas with pragmatic considerations, with the goal of the work’s quality and relevance standing the test of time. These considerations are no different in product. Although the landscape of technology changes quickly, the goals of durability, flexibility, relevance, and ability to adapt in the future are the same.

7. Technical specifications

Most people think of architectural documents as drawings. Drawings are a critical part of the contractual documents, but the lesser known part of design deliverables are the project specifications (specs). As the technical lead at my landscape architectural firm, I managed our technical specs library and came to deeply enjoy the structure, specificity, and craft needed to produce this part of the contract documents. In product, I’ve found this training and experience to be very valuable as it has allowed me to apply the same level of rigor and language specificity to product documentation, from product vision all the way down to bug-fix development tickets. 

In researching this post, I discovered this quote that I quite resonate with:

Your background in architecture has taught you to break problems down into logical chunks and think about them in sort of a 3 dimensional way. I have learned over time that most other people approach tasks in a 2D or linear fashion (first do this, then do this, etc...). In my experience, this will give you a huge advantage when it comes to problem-solving and bringing creative ideas to the table. The leap from architecture to product management seems like a natural one in my eyes. In architecture we already are product managers for the structures we are developing. We know them inside and out, answer questions about the design, advise on changes, and contribute to broader solutions by using our product as a tool.

source: https://tinyurl.com/muhd742j

Final thoughts

I like the term carry forward because it recognizes value and applies a generous lens to how we can learn from our past experiences and apply that learning to our current state. I will continue using the term while continuing to ask myself what skills I can carry forward into my life and work.

A few years ago I did not anticipate a pivot into product. I am grateful for all the friends and colleagues who have supported my journey.

—-----------------------------

The body as a metaphor is effective because everyone can relate to it. We all have a general understanding of our own anatomy. We may live in different places, different circumstances, with different gods and hairstyles and diets. But we all have bodies. This is also why body humor will always be a staple of standup comedy.

Body analogies can be used to explain different facets of an IoT sensor system – such as design, cost, and maintenance needs – so that a customer can gauge whether the solution is a good fit for their problem and understand the responsibilities of ownership.

How IoT networks are similar to the human nervous system:

1. [System design]: Sensors need to be properly positioned and calibrated to collect quality data.

Imagine if the taste receptors in your mouth were instead on your chin. And they could only sense bitterness. This setup would not only make it less efficient to eat, it would also limit the information we receive, making eating both less enjoyable and riskier. No joy from the sweet taste of ice cream – and also fewer signals alerting us to food gone bad.

IoT is the same: If a directional sensor is pointed in the wrong direction, placed in the wrong place, or incorrectly calibrated, you’re out of luck. IoT devices need to key into the data they are trying to collect, be this through proximiy, orientation, power level, etc. For complex use cases, I lead a pre-design phase with the customer to fully understand their use cases and business requirements. 

2. [Network capacity and quality]: Transmission capability has a major impact on data quality.

Verizon has tried for years to educate us about the importance of a high-quality network. They’re not wrong.

In IoT, the quality of data a sensor collects is only as good as the network's ability to send that data to the appropriate upstream endpoint for processing. Any loss in data quality, such as dropped packets, will decrease the timeliness or quality of the data, perhaps even rendering it useless. Consequently, reduced data quality erodes the ability of the IoT solution to answer complex questions. 

As an analogy, the importance of transmission quality for the body’s nervous system is also paramount. If a nerve is sensing something but the message isn't being sent upstream to be processed and decoded by my brain, it doesn’t allow me to understand and respond. I remember as a kid being fascinated when some part of my body would get pins and needles after awkward positioning. Because of restricted blood flow, the nerves could not transmit data upstream. It’s fun if you’re experimenting as a kid, but can have serious consequences otherwise.

3. [Cost]: Sensor network density should vary based on the resolution of data you need. 

When designing IoT systems, we’re trying to achieve a Goldilocks equilibrium: not too many sensors, not too few. Juuust right. Where we need lots of data, plan for a significant investment. Where we need less, be thrifty.

On our bodies, our skin follows these same tenets. We have vastly different densities of nerve endings depending on the needs of each part of our body. To be economical, when low resolution information is needed, like on our elbows, nerve endings are distributed less densely and often do not even have access to the highest-speed nerves to send information to our brain. On the flip side, our dextrous, fine-tuned fingers are packed with sensitive nerves and connected to high-speed connections to our brains.

4. [Security] Networks can be overwhelmed, and there are significant consequences to their ability to function.

Just as too much stimuli can be overwhelming to our bodies, IoT systems can suffer from similar overloads. One malicious IoT example is a DDoS attack in which network overload overwhelms a server and causes it to go down. This type of attack can paralyze its target and leave us without access to cat videos or bank accounts.

5. [Ability to learn]: Insights can be improved with attention and practice

The practice of mindfulness meditation directs attention toward our body in a way that focuses our awareness. This can allow previously unnoticed sensations to be noticed, without additional information. Increased awareness is often a result of pain, forcing us to pay attention to more efficient or less taxing ways of moving. 

In IoT networks, increased awareness of existing data can happen with the use of machine learning or artificial intelligence. By training our model using machine learning, we can increase awareness of our data – revealing trends, potential issues, or answers much faster and more efficiently than without training. Same data, better insights. 

Thanks for making it to the end! If you’d enjoyed this article, I’d be delighted for you to add your comments below or invite some friends to read, too. 

I am intrigued by the wide range of organizational approaches to decision-making and also the many similarities. In large organizations, different functions and individuals within those functions each have different starting points on their decision-making journey. The specific path by which people get to “Yes” or “No” or “Not now” is based on their experience, interest, time, openness to change, and their level of involvement or level of impactedness from the project.

My most recent experience is leading the product function for a healthcare technology company that provides indoor positioning/proximity IoT solutions. In this case, a complex organization (a hospital or hospital network) will make consequential (costly and long-term) decisions about which technology and vendor they will choose for widespread use. The decision that they make will support multiple use cases, including asset tracking, nurse call, patient workflow, staff duress, hand hygiene…the list goes on. A non-optimal decision could bring them closer to achieving their goals or seriously hamper their efforts.

Here are five key factors to remember during the decision-making process:

1. There is no substitute for time: Both parties should be prepared to be patient and to persevere. Within a large organization, many different stakeholders and many different initiatives are jockeying for priority. It will take sustained effort to coordinate and align all the involved parties. Even just discovering all the stakeholders can take a good deal of work. Even a good understanding of the pain points and solutions can only shorten the timeline so much. Knowledge of the key players on the customer side is critical, which which us to point #2:

2. Find out who is championing for change and make them your ally: these are the project champions, and they are special people. They have the vision to advocate for a better future state, but also awareness of the internal processes and politics that need to be navigated in order to get there. This person is fluent in the language of the organization and often politically savvy in advocating for better solutions. The most successful champions are organized, well-liked, and firm but fair. However, it may take some work to discover who the project champion is, because they may work a bit behind the scenes.

3. Being honest about whether a solution-problem fit exists: The purpose of dialogue is not to make a sale, it’s to educate both parties and determine whether a transaction makes sense. A sale makes sense if the needs of the organization can be met by the current solution of the vendor, or by a modified version of the solution that is on the near-term product roadmap. Discovering and discussing the level of the solution-problem fit is advantageous to everyone, and time is of the essence. Regardless of outcome, arriving at an understanding of this should be seen as an accomplishment. If a fit exists, it will allow both parties to move forward in good faith. If a fit does not exist, the vendor should make a recommendation as to where to look for an alternate solution, and everyone can move along without wasting time. With integrity, there is upside to assessing a solution-problem fit quickly, regardless of yea or nea. 

4. Tailored messaging is important. Different audiences think and communicate in different ways. They use different languages, and they inhabit different worlds. They are going to focus on different things when making decisions, including timeline, financials, operations, staffing, etc. For example, while the CFO and the director of operations are both concerned about preventing loss, the CFO may be more focused on quarterly or annual time horizons, while the director is likely more engaged in the daily actions of their team. While project financials are important to both parties, the talking points and metrics that they are primarily interested in are decidedly different.

5. Let prospects talk to your existing customers: People love seeing solutions in action, and listening to people who they can deeply relate to, like a person in an identical role and function in a site that is currently using your solution. Even though it requires significant resources, a site tour where prospective customers can interact with their counterparts is an A+ move for building confidence and rapport.

   

   What are your thoughts on this? How have you experienced success in determining whether a technology solution is a good fit for a customer? What other hard-won pointers have you learned? Join the conversation below.

To fill these gaps, companies are rapidly innovating New Cool Tools to improve hardware and software and remove barriers to adoption. 

Recently there’s been a major upswing in innovations to attempt to remove these barriers. I think much of the innovation (and general awareness) of IoT proximity systems has been driven by two unfortunate factors: the COVID-19 pandemic and the threat of violence in schools and workplaces. In this article, I am going to focus on the effects of COVID, which I experienced through the lens of my company’s hospital customers.

During the pandemic, many organizations tried to answer difficult questions for the first time, such as:

• Can we monitor and manage social distancing?

• Can we help our frontline workers by making their work easier and safer?

• Can we understand occupancy of our workplace and manage it in a way that could reduce transmission?

• Can we use technology to backfill for workers who left and cannot currently be replaced?

• Is there a way to validate quality along our supply chain for important vaccines and medications?

In an attempt to provide solutions quickly, many technology providers pivoted their offerings, updating software and messaging to address these timely questions. At the same time, many organizations seriously considered IoT sensor technology for the first time. Not many hospitals decided to deploy a solution during COVID, but by exploring their options, they gained awareness of the capabilities available. Many of them have continued to be interested, and some have become customers. 

While COVID generated a burst of awareness, it also laid bare some of the technical and process gaps that interfere with rapid, widespread deployment. And now, innovators are innovating in response to this exposure.

Part of my job is to understand the New Cool Tools that are being developed, assess their quality and commercial value, and choose and implement the best-in-class solutions for our customers. The New Cool Tools that have the best chance of becoming New Normal are those that address the biggest pain points: integrating with other systems, reducing maintenance, increasing security, enhancing accuracy, and reducing complexity at every project stage from design to decommission. 

Here are some of the New Cool Tools I am currently watching:

1. Battery-free tags

   • Problem:  When batteries in tags need to be manually replaced, the results include higher costs for parts and labor and an increased likelihood that system quality will degrade and the solution will be abandoned by the customer.

   • Promise: Tags that run on ambient energy can eliminate the need for batteries entirely, which reduces the cost of parts and labor and increases system reliability.

   • Geek out more: The battery-free IoT revolution is here

2. RFID tags

   • Problem: Tags that actively beacon out their location can be expensive, and require battery changes. (RFID tags have to be scanned, and are passive)

   • Promise: RFID tags are passive, and have to be scanned with a reader. However, they are very cheap, extremely durable, and can hold an increasing amount of data. They can be attached to nearly any item, even if it gets laundered or sterilized. As reader and tag technology gets better, RFID tags can be used in many circumstances where previously an active technology was needed.

   • Geek out: Skip Waiting in Line with Amazon’s Just Walk Out Technology

3. Communication protocols

   • Problem: Range limitations for communication between IoT devices results in systems that require more hardware, adding cost and complexity.

   • Promise: Longer-range, lower-power capabilities would massively reduce cost and complexity.

   • Geek out more: Another Record Breaking Transmission for LoRaWAN

4. Using fancy code instead fancy hardware

   • Problem: Traditionally, a high level of accuracy has required a high level of hardware density, adding cost, complexity, security vulnerability, and maintenance.

   • Promise: Using smart algorithms that leverage machine learning and AI,location data of a similar quality can be synthesized using far less data and hardware.

5. On-chip and edge computing

   • Problem: Data transmission to and from cloud data centers to perform compute tasks takes energy, adds cost, requires  time, and increases security risks.

   • Promise: If data can be processed into valuable data either on-chip or by an edge compute device, savings happen at multiple dimensions and system performance improves. 

   • Geek out more: Edge-Computing Architectures for Internet of Things Applications

6. Cross-industry location data interoperability

   • Problem: Lack of standards for proximity data leads to inefficiencies, errors and vendor lock-up.

   • Promise: Widespread adoption of data and communication standards would save time and frustration.

   • Geek out more: omlox is the world’s first positioning standard and has the promise of seamless integration of data from a wide range of technologies.

7. Artificial intelligence

   • Problem: IoT data volumes can be immense. There could be meaningful insight hidden in plain sight, but unless you build the right query, it could be hidden from you.

   • Promise: AI can recognize patterns and point them out proactively, revealing hidden insights and enabling faster decisions and earlier diagnoses of issues

   • Geek out more: Exploring the dynamic fusion of AI and the IoT

Most of the New Cool Tools being developed in each of these areas will fail, but the best and most consequential ones, with a dash of luck, will become our New Normals. I am optimistic about the future of positioning technology. I imagine that in the not-too-distant future we’ll be attaching tags to most things we own and having near-constant visibility of them. We’ll look back and smile, grateful for the advances of the past and the powerful technology at hand.

What New Cool Tools are you keep tabs on in your world? What kind of a difference do you think they’ll make? Leave your comments below!

Technologic innovation is the same as innovation in the wood shop, kitchen, or any kind of maker space. Instead of different quilt patterns or recipes, technology innovators use code and hardware. Most of the innovation comes from arranging existing components in novel ways to create new “tools.” The new tools can then be used going forward.

I call this the New Cool Tool —> Now Normal cycle. I think it applies to innovation in all fields, and I think it generally goes like this:

1. We create a crude tool 🛠️ with the best knowledge and materials we have to meet our basic requirements at the time. We experience a brief pause of wonder and appreciation for this New Cool Tool.

2. We refine the tool’s initial design, creating variations of it to address specialized use cases.  

3. We improve the efficiency of this tool’s manufacturing and distribution so the tool becomes widely available for a reasonable cost. The tool is now a Now Normal tool.

4. The Now Normal tool is ubiquitous, and the amount of effort that went into creating the tool is forgotten or mostly taken for granted.

5. The ease of obtaining and using a Now Normal tool enables a wide range of people to create a new generation of New Cool Tools to meet their specific needs. A small number of these are breakthroughs and will endure.

6. Go back to #1, repeat.

Tool pyramid: New Cool Tools stand on the shoulders of generations of Now Normal tools.

You know for certain that a tool is Now Normal when you see it consistently as a project requirement. Cloud hosting is a good example of this: It is ubiquitous, it is expected, it is mainstream. It also was barely a thing 20 years ago.

For every tool that travels the innovation spectrum from New Cool Tool —> Now Normal, many others are forgotten and end up cast into the Recycling Bin, where they linger until forgotten or wait to be retrieved for future use.

I have come to appreciate how similar the New Cool Tool —> Now Normal process is across disciplines. The most admirable innovators across disciplines seem to:

• Use the tools (materials and processes) they are most familiar with, but in novel combinations to solve specific problems.

• Be genuinely curious about their target problem, but flexible enough to shift focus if something promising catches their attention.

• Move through the cycle of ideation, hypothesizing, prototyping, testing, and refining quickly. 

• Share their work for feedback, either publicly or from trusted peers.

What tools have you seen successfully cross the threshold from New Cool Tool —> Now Normal? What are some tools that didnt, but you hoped would have? I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments!

Hi, I’m Andreas. I live in the high desert of New Mexico. In reverse chronological order, my family includes two guinea pigs, a few dozen fish, my son (3), my daughter (5) and my wife/cat. The wife/cat came as a non-negotiable set. 

I work in the sector of indoor positioning and in the sub-sector of real-time location systems (RTLS). In this sector, we use sensor networks to determine where things are located inside a building. I work in the sub-sub-sector of clinical RTLS, which focuses on knowing the real-time location of many things (equipment, patients, staff) inside hospitals. My team makes software that is used by hospitals across the country to answer lots of different complex questions. All of these questions point toward the goal of improving patient care.

Prior to this career and in another dimension, I earned a master's degree from UC Berkeley in landscape architecture and founded a professional services firm in San Francisco. My firm worked on projects across the country but mostly in California. We did good work. We had a great team. We won awards. But change happens, and my next act as a family man shifted focus and priorities in ways that were surprising and real. When we moved to be close to extended family, I had an opportunity to pivot into my current work, relying heavily on the core skills that I sharpened running a design firm and growing my interest and aptitude in technology.

Wired & Inspired is my first foray into sharing my thoughts and experiences with a wider community. My posts will mostly focus on technology, with a strong influence from my first career as a designer, and an undercurrent of the types of moral and spiritual questions I find fascinating. 

This is generally how I feel about sharing on the internet:

That said, there are a few reasons why I've decided to share my ideas and writing, and I wanted to share those with you:

I have eked out just enough capacity

I've spent the past few years bringing kids into the world, making a big career change and moving to be close to extended family. Like all of us, I have stumbled through the impossible choices required by the pandemic. Now that things have settled a bit, I find myself with just enough spare time, along with a strong desire to share with others. Professionally, I feel confident about my contributions and knowledge, freeing me (mostly) from the imposter syndrome that has kept me from sharing my thoughts previously.

It feels important

Over the years, I've experienced positivity from sharing my work with others. I've made new friends, gained interesting and thought-provoking perspectives (and criticism!), and been inspired by other people. When possible, I’ve made IRL friendships out of virtual ones. I want to contribute to this positive cycle of sharing and learning.

I have a deep backlog

I've been writing privately for years, but I've never shared my work with a wider audience. I’d like to put this content out into the world – not just for display, but for dialogue. I hope that my experiences and insights can help or inspire others, personally or professionally.

I care about more than just technology

While I work in technology, I find that there are many links and overlaps with other things I care about. I'm interested in spirituality, psychology, how we teach and accomplish design, and the importance of communication and collaboration to solve complex problems with high-quality solutions. I hope to explore these topics more deeply in my writing and offer some off-beat observations and interesting ideas that might be valuable to readers.

I'm (mostly) enthusiastic and optimistic

Despite all the challenges we face as a society, I'm enthusiastic and generally optimistic about how technology can be designed to solve our growing list of complex problems. From compassionate healthcare solutions to bold climate action, I am hopeful that properly designed technology solutions can make a positive difference in the world.

Technology solutions also require non-technical skills

A common misconception inside tech is that data or logic can stand on its own as an answer and a change driver. This simply isn’t the case, and I’ve witnessed the opposite in every project I’ve worked on across two sectors. I want to explore these skills more deeply and share my insights with others.

I'm excited to take this step and start sharing my experiences and insights with a wider audience. I hope that my work can help others who are going through similar personal or professional challenges, and that we can all learn and grow together.

What do you think? What questions, ideas, or feedback came up for you? You are hereby invited to read and share!