Product development needs to include many elements such as strategy, research and design. Chris van der Walt is the Product Lead at AssetFuture and took some time out to talk product, tech and what the future holds.
Q: What’s your role at AssetFuture?
A: I’m the Product Lead at AssetFuture. I am responsible for understanding our customers’ needs and figuring out how they can be transformed into successful products or features that align with AssetFuture’s business goals. It’s a really cool role because it involves bringing business strategy, research, design, and technology together to create high quality, meaningful, and useful capabilities for our customers.
Q: You’re new to the industry, do you see any opportunities for technological advances in Asset Management?
A: I 've been working in asset management for a bit over 6 months now and I am excited by the opportunities in this industry. There’s a lot of interest in taking a more data-driven approach, but I think the long planning cycles involved in managing physical infrastructure have slowed adoption. Many organisations don’t even know whether their asset register is complete, never mind what condition their infrastructure is in! I think it creates quite a lot of anxiety because if you don’t understand the condition of your assets, you can’t understand the extent of your risk exposure.
I believe that technology is going to completely transform this industry. It is impossible to model the condition of a portfolio of large assets like schools or hospitals by hand. Buildings change depending on the environment they are in, how they are used, the quality and age of their fittings and many other factors. The only way to accurately understand this complexity is through employing technologies that consistently and accurately model how everything degrades over time while also considering the impacts of maintenance and replacement cycles.
This is exactly what AssetFuture does so well. Our products enable our customers to create a complete and comprehensive view of their asset portfolio today and gives them a crystal ball that helps them make the right decisions to ensure optimal performance of their assets decades into the future. Obviously changes in utilisation over the last 12 months have changed the lifecycle profiles of many assets, and our technology has been able to adapt to these changes giving our customers confidence in their decisions.
Q: How do you prioritise customer feedback requests or enhancements?
A: Customer feedback is very important to AssetFuture and we are always open to suggestions and ideas. Whenever a customer requests a new feature or enhancement, it is entered into our feature request pipeline where it can be considered in one of our fortnightly reviews.
The first thing we do when reviewing a request is to take a step back to try to understand what the context and goals of the requester are so that we can take a holistic view and examine different options for resolving it. We also consider the request in light of its alignment with the needs of other customers and of the business, the resources required to develop it, the urgency of the need and other factors. Finally, we consider this against all other requests. If it meets all of our criteria for reach, impact, urgency, and effort, then it gets added to our product roadmap for development.
Q: What’s coming next in Product?
A: We’re currently working on a number of exciting product initiatives. These include changes to the web platform user experience and a number of automation initiatives. We are presenting some of these concepts and findings at upcoming industry events, which is very exciting.
In all our product roll outs, we look at how can help our customers fulfil business outcomes, and to enable evidence-based decision making.
Q: What do you see as key for the industry going forward?
A: Today, everything is about customer experience. That means ensuring that our customers have a flawless experience with our platform, so they can manage their assets in a way that optimises the experience for their customers and other relevant stakeholders.
““Tech and product are the unifying force for customer experience. It’s about enabling our customers to work smarter and more efficiently, empowering them to make better decisions and achieve outstanding business outcomes.””
Chris Van der Walt is the Product Lead at AssetFuture in Sydney. Chris has 20 years of experience in design and technology innovation at both the United Nations where he was a founding member of the UN Secretary-General’s real-time data initiative called Global Pulse and as the founder and CEO of an information technology startup called Factr.