Project Deep Dive

Carter: Robust AI

My Role

Head of Product -> VP Customer Success

At Robust AI I led product management for all SW and HW teams from our first working prototype unit to our first batch of 60 production units. As the production units headed to customers, I formed the Customer Success team and focused on ensuring our customers had smooth deployments and our team had the tools needed to scale.

Test Early and Often
of entry

I believe there is no substitute for testing early and often, especially with products having both new hardware AND new software. I developed relationships with managers at two local warehouses that became Robust’s invaluable testing grounds. At these sites I conducted interviews, shadowed workers, tested mock-ups before we built, and tested our functional prototypes. The data gained from these sites allowed our teams to iterate and improve quickly and allowed us to move to an official POC earlier than expected.

Too early to start a POC?

While the team was still months away from our full initial software release, I pushed for a POC at a customer site. I saw from visiting various sites and from site data that we could provide value at certain sites even with no integration and minimal functionality. DHL also saw the value and agreed to a POC with 5 of our robots. I focused the workflow on eliminating unproductive walking going between where carts are loaded with totes, the actual picking aisles, and the packing stations. Data from this POC gave our team key insights for both software and hardware decisions needed for our production units. Our productivity gains were greater than the DHL expected and this POC led to a 5 year high value agreement.

Connecting customers to engineering

In founding the customer success team at Robust, I had to ensure the customers were always able to contact our team and our engineers were quickly aware of critical issues. Working with our infrastructure team, I set up Jira Service Management to create a simple to use on-call system for our customer support team. I designed a customer portal for users to submit any issues. Since this was a Jira based system, I could easily filter and prioritize issues before tagging engineers as needed to any customer tickets. This ensured that critical issues made their way into sprints and the issues were resolved in a timely matter.

POC acceptance criteria
exceeded by

80%

NPS Score

80+