The Peggy Smedley Show: Move Fast, Make Smart Decisions

Twisthink’s CEO, Dave Moelker, had the opportunity to join The Peggy Smedley Show podcast to talk about a team that is redefining what real innovation looks like, focusing on helping companies turn their physical products into smart, intelligent, and connected systems.

They also discuss:

· How Twisthink connects strategy, design, and engineering.

· A case study of remote monitoring in the mining industry.

· How to move faster with AI, while also making good, smart decisions.

Transcript

[00:00:06] Peggy Smedley: Welcome back to the Peggy Smedley Show. Your voice for our connected world with your host, Peggy Smedley. Hello, listeners. Welcome back to the Peggy Smedley Show. I’m your host, Peggy Smedley. Today, we’re taking a closer look at a team that’s redefining what real innovation looks like. They don’t just design products or build technology, they connect strategy, design, and engineer in a way that helps companies move faster, think bigger, and create solutions that actually win in the market. If you’ve ever wondered what separates the innovators from the imitators, this is the conversation that will make it clear. I’m welcoming back Dave Moelker, CEO of Twisthink, to continue our second in a three part monthly series. As we look closer at Twisthink and what you need to know to design the best products in today’s fast customer facing world, and how you get that edge of the competition. Dave, welcome back to the show.

[00:01:11] Dave Moelker: Great to be back with you, Peggy.

[00:01:14] Peggy Smedley: Dave, you and I talked the last time we were together about some of the challenges. And I thought for this show, maybe we need to step back and let’s give our listeners who might not really understand what is Twisthink. I think there’s so many voices out there all trying to position themselves, but they don’t really understand where you fit in because you are doing something very unique in some ways and very complicated in a lot of other ways. But what’s the simplest way? I would like to say that for listeners that describe you. What? Why it matters right now? Because you guys have been around for a long time. You found some impressive companies who are leading the charge in many verticals. But I want you to help people understand why it makes a difference.

[00:02:02] Dave Moelker: Yeah. Thanks, Peggy. Yeah. I think to start with kind of where we focused. So we really focused on helping companies turn their physical products into smart, intelligent and connected systems. And we do that, like you said, through this cross-functional team that we have that blends strategists with design with a wide range of engineering capabilities across electronics, firmware, cloud, data, applications, really all the breadth of what we need to deliver on these connected solutions and the value of data. And now AI as that continues to grow rapidly, right. And where we see that mattering right now, especially and like you said, we’ve been around for a while, been around for 25 years, and we’ve really believed in that cross-functional team forever. But it really has become increasingly important as the complexity of these systems goes up. You cannot afford to build them in silos. We need this these different perspectives and these different disciplines working together from the very beginning in order to unlock solutions that are actually commercially viable and driving value in the market. But they have that technical feasibility and the really resonating with users. All of that is needed. And bringing that together helps us enable our customers to de-risk their development projects, get to market faster. Like you say, speed matters and all that comes together in a really cohesive way from our perspective.

[00:03:28] Peggy Smedley: I think some companies are really good at strategy. Some companies are really good at design, some companies are really good at engineering. But you put it all together, and that’s what I think is really unique in the way companies need to understand how innovation works. Talk about that again and maybe in greater detail of why that matters in an ever changing environment.

[00:03:50] Dave Moelker: Yeah, I think again, it comes to complexity. It comes to decision making is a really critical part of what it allows us to do. But when we have that strategy, providing that business context, that understanding of where are we going to create value in the market, design, making sure that we’re building something that users will actually use, it fits into their workflows and technology teams making sure that the solution can actually be built, it can be scaled, it can be deployed in the real world. All of those become really important. And when you miss any one of the clinical legs of those of that stool, you create a lot of risk in what you’re doing and it becomes a big challenge. The other one is, frankly, just the dated culture and challenges probably a lot of your listeners have experienced when you bring in a partner who just has one capability, integrating teams is hard. It takes a lot of cultural work, and for our team is used to working together day in and day out. That drives a lot of efficiency and a lot of effectiveness in the work that we do by just having teams that know how to work together, understand the different perspectives and language that gets used for these different disciplines and can really help, again, get to the right solution faster through that process.

[00:04:57] Peggy Smedley: It’s tricky to be in the market today. And how does your model prevent companies, or I should say, when we look at the market, the digital product, that needs to come out to really succeed and be unique in a market that is changing ever so fast.

[00:05:14] Dave Moelker: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of different ways that we can help there, but I think one of them is to avoid, frankly, an over fixation on the product itself, which sounds a little bit funny coming from a team that focuses on product development. But what we see is when organizations get over fixated on the product as a thing, especially in the physical world, but even in the digital case, that’s where you can really have these misses and do put a lot of time and energy into the wrong thing. And it really slows you down. And so I think being able to bring these teams together and understand all these different dynamics in parallel allows us to focus on what is the right product, and there’s ways in which the product needs to be designed and developed in order to support the other dimensions of what’s needed to be successful. So, for example, especially in digital and connected products, how service and sales and these other dimensions come together become really important, and we can start to design capabilities and features into these products that support sales and don’t become a point of friction in the sales process. Or they support service and they don’t become a point of friction in service, because we’re considering that full breadth really from the start.

[00:06:24] Peggy Smedley: And that’s a really important point because OEMs are under intense pressure to modernize, differentiate, move faster. What does Twisthink do that helps them break through that pressure but deliver something that makes them above the rest?

[00:06:41] Dave Moelker: Yeah, I think on that front and we hit it even the last time we met. But making decisions quickly, right. So even with AI, it allows us to move faster. We want to move faster, we want to move faster. But we have to do that in the context of making good, smart decisions. And so some of the way that we frame what we do is really empowering our clients with the inputs that they need in order to make good decisions. Right. And that can show up either on the technical front, right. Thinking about what’s the right architecture, what’s the right technology, what’s the right solution that’s going to scale. It can show up on the business case or in the user side of it, with really deeply understanding the market and doing the right research to understand that you have the inputs to make the right choices. And so we really want to be able to move quickly. We need to be able to make decisions quickly. And going through the journey of product development with many organizations, I’ll say there’s nothing that creates more sand in the gears of product development than when you can’t make decisions. When everybody is paralyzed by, should we do this or should we do that? And so I think in order to move fast, we want to make sure we’re arming our clients and our teams with that ability to make decisions quickly based on the actual insights, not just the loudest voice in the room or whoever’s gut says we should do that or that, and being able to do that in the smart way throughout the process.

[00:07:57] Peggy Smedley: I don’t want you to give away your secret sauce here, but if a company comes to you with their challenge and they say, what happens first? How do you walk them through your or walk us? Walk me through your approach so that they can say, all right, I get it. I this can really help us solve the problem and be the leader in the market.

[00:08:18] Dave Moelker: Yeah, yeah. So first, like you say, we want to make sure we’re understanding your goals and objectives. Where are we trying to go? What are we trying to do. And then the most important thing from there I would say, is what we would call assumptions mapping or making sure we’re understanding what are the assumptions that we’re making and which of these are the most risky. If we get them wrong, they will torpedo our likelihood of success, to put it maybe a little bit dramatically. Right. So what are the assumptions we’re making? Are we assuming that the technology will work? Are we assuming that people will want this? Are we assuming we can sell it for this price point? What are we assuming and if we’re wrong about that? What does that mean? What are the implications for that? And then we build out a plan to say, let’s go close those gaps in assumptions. Let’s go do that research. Let’s go build a proof of concept or a prototype to prove out that technical feasibility, whatever those biggest risk items are. Let’s go check those off before we start spending the time and the dollars, frankly, to do full on product development, because the later we find out that our assumptions might be wrong or we might challenge those assumptions, the more time consuming and costly it’s going to be to resolve that, right? So let’s resolve them up front and then get that clarity and then be able to move into the development process with confidence that we’re headed in the right direction. So that’s where we start and it flows from there. And ultimately about getting products launched into the market.

[00:09:39] Peggy Smedley: What are we talking about? Give me some examples so that somebody listening says, oh, I get that. I know that company. I know who they’ve helped along the way.

[00:09:48] Dave Moelker: Yeah, yeah. One would be a company that we served called Flexco. So they operate in the mining industry in conveyor belts for the mining industry market market leader there for over a hundred years. But their products were primarily physical, mechanical products without any technology or smart capability connectivity built into them. And so they approached us with a fairly open ended question, saying, how might we start to use technology to deliver better outcomes for our customers and for our service teams, for third party service teams, etc.? And so we started the process engaging their internal teams with an understanding of where do they see the value. And from there we were able to get out into some great engagements, and our team was able to travel from the United States, even out to Australia, and visit sites there and visit mines here in the US and all over to really begin to understand where we can create that value and where those opportunities lie. And from that, after looking at a range of different solution options, we did land on a custom connected device solution, a sensor solution that can be retrofitted onto their existing product, support new products, and the value being the ability to remotely monitor these conveyor belt cleaners that they have, enabling service teams to, instead of traveling out to these remote, difficult to access sites. Being able to prioritize their service efforts to the assets that were most at risk for the end mining sites, being able to see that they had better uptime, they had fewer issues with the conveyor belt assets that they had is extremely valuable. If you know the mining industry, it’s all about throughput, it’s all about tonnage moved, etc. and downtime is a big deal. And it starts with getting out there, understanding the need and then designing the right physical device and connecting that to the cloud back end and the digital experiences on top of that really unlock the value for those service teams and for the whole ecosystem for Flexco.

[00:11:47] Peggy Smedley: So, Dave, what I just heard you say, and for all the listeners out there, maintenance has a horrible downtime problem, uptime problem, understanding everything. We’re not only talking about existing companies, but their idea of servicing customers’ customers. So the way companies should be, organizations should be thinking about this is not only what they do for themselves, but what they do for their partners and how this can help them reduce costs and relationship building. So what you’re doing here is something that is a human-centered design that’s much bigger than maybe they’re thinking as they’re listening to this, is this what we’re talking about? It’s going to a much greater thought process as they’re listening to this conversation.

[00:12:31] Dave Moelker: Yeah, I think that’s a great way to think about it. I think one of the themes that we like to push on is, what is the system that this solution needs to live in, not just who’s the singular end user. So I would say we talk about human-centered design, which is focusing on the people, but not just that singular end users. So who are the service teams? Who are the channel partners? The distributors? The sales channel that you have are the third party maintenance teams, the end customer? In almost every B2B context we operate in, it’s more complex than just company sells widget to end user, done. Right. There’s dealers involved. There’s so many different folks involved. And we need to make sure that we’re building solutions that consider how they impact each one of those. Right. Because if you miss even one of those links in the ecosystem, frankly, it can really slow down adoption in a pretty dramatic way from what we’ve seen in the market. Yeah, it’s getting to understanding that, taking that time, sometimes it feels like slowing down at the beginning of the process because especially engineering driven organizations want to get to building the thing. Right. Let’s start building. Let’s start building. And we see a lot of value in being able to slow down, making sure we’re understanding the context clearly and making sure we’re designing the right solutions to fit within that.

[00:13:45] Peggy Smedley: Going back when, we’re running out of time, going back to our original conversation, it goes back to the data. And a lot of these OEMs don’t realize how much data they have. And it’s looking back at that data. And now with AI, you can interpret this information and say there’s so much opportunity to grow and that’s where your expertise comes in. So let’s talk about what would be the call to action here for someone listening that says why would they turn to Twisthink right now to say, look, here’s where you can walk in the door and say, let’s at least look at what you have to where do you start to at least saying, let’s not eat the entire elephant, but let’s take a chunk out of it to start and evaluate the operation?

[00:14:26] Dave Moelker: Yeah, yeah. I think recognizing, like you say, that we have an opportunity starting with, okay, we think we have an opportunity here with the data, but we don’t know where to start. I’d say a lot of folks we’re talking to you right now, especially seeing the traction of AI generally or saying, I don’t really even know where to start. And that’s fine, right? So sometimes I think folks don’t pick up the phone and call us because I don’t quite know how to frame what I’m asking for yet. And that’s okay. I would say feel free to connect with us and reach out. And that’s part of, frankly, what I think our team is really great at doing is helping figure out and frame up what is that solution that we’re going after so that we can get into engineering. So if you’re thinking, hey, I’ve got to have a full project buttoned up and dialed in and ready to hand over, maybe think about the ways that we could partner to help you think through even framing up what that opportunity or what that challenge is so we don’t have to dive right into and have a perfectly defined development project, but we can start early in the process, understand where those gaps and those assumptions are. Go through that assumptions mapping exercise like I talked about and really start to define an initial step to challenge maybe what some of those assumptions are that we have.

[00:15:32] Peggy Smedley: I have to say, the largest companies in the world are still trying to figure it all out. So if it’s a medium size to a small OEM trying to figure out, they’re along for the ride in the journey like everyone else. So Dave Moelker, CEO of Twisthink, where can our listeners go to get in touch with you and to really engage?

[00:15:49] Dave Moelker: Yeah. So you can head to our website: www.twisthink.com. Check us out as well on LinkedIn. Feel free to reach out to me directly. Love to connect with anybody who wants to connect on LinkedIn and looking forward to continuing the conversation.

[00:16:02] Peggy Smedley: Dave, thank you again for all your time today.

[00:16:05] Dave Moelker: Yeah, thanks so much, Peggy.

[00:16:06] Peggy Smedley: Okay, listeners, that is all the time we have for today. Make sure to share and subscribe to our episodes each week. Share your thoughts with me on X Connected World or follow us on LinkedIn, our YouTube and continue the conversation there. Please check out our website and follow our newsletter and read our blogs at www.connectedworld.com or our show website at www.peggysmedleyshow.com. Remember, we broadcast live every Tuesday at 12 p.m. central and we follow our podcast on Thursday. This is the Peggy Smedley Show, your voice for our connected world. And remember, with great technology comes great responsibility. Have an awesome week!