Milwaukee Tool has more than a century of experience making hardware for the construction industry and other hands-on fields. But since it debuted its ONE-KEY line of connected tools and apps in late 2015, it’s also been a software company, building digital frameworks that let customers digitally organize, monitor, locate, and configure their power tools from smartphones and other devices, including disabling them if they’re lost or stolen.
Andy Lambert, Vice President of Digital Product, spoke with InnoLead about building out an internal software firm at a hardware manufacturing company; listening to customers to understand how technology can make their work safer and more efficient; and developing metrics that go beyond traditional software KPIs like time spent in the app.
His Role
Andy Lambert: I oversee the product management and commercial execution teams around digital products. My focus has been more on our enterprise users —the organizations that leverage our digital products. A really good example has been the ONE-KEY app itself.
The Project
AL: We launched ONE-KEY in late 2015 on the heels of some organizational transformation that happened in the 2000s and 2010s. We didn’t want to be known purely as a power tool company but more as a solutions provider to the industries we serve.
We were looking to explore how connectivity could have an impact in tools. We saw we could allow someone to connect to the tool, customize its controls and performance, and get tracking and location services for that tool.
But in order to do so, you have to have this digital companion along for the ride. So that’s where the ONE-KEY software app evolved. The quest to invest in connected power tools led to the need for this digital product as well. So if we’re going to have this software app, what could it do? The MVP for the software was, let’s just allow someone to keep a list of the tools they own, and then we could learn from that and just continuously iterate. It’s now become kind of a full-fledged enterprise inventory management solution, focusing on tools.
How It Got Green-Lit
AL: When we look back to the 2010s, there were a lot of big breakthroughs for us as we invested in battery technology, motor technology, and electronics. And we continued to come back to this singular focus on the user themselves.
Thankfully we have an organization willing to continuously invest in disruptive innovation. So we were able to get the green light on embedding Bluetooth in an initial set of seven core power tools.
Obviously as a hardware manufacturing company that’s looking at connectivity and software, that’s a major shift. So it was very much a crawl, walk, run approach, leveraging research with our core end users along the way. We needed to look into IoT engineering resources from the electrical engineering side, but we also needed to start building a software development organization within this manufacturing company.
The hardware manufacturing product development life cycle is very waterfall in nature, whereas software engineering has shifted over to agile development.
The hardware manufacturing product development life cycle is very waterfall in nature, whereas software engineering has shifted over to agile development. So one of the complexities of just getting this off the ground was the need to intertwine that agile software development into a rigorous waterfall process to make these things click at the same time. So we started small, with seven tools and an iOS, Android, and web app to keep a list of those tools. Then as we got this into the marketplace, we could continue to learn from our end users in the industry itself.
We went from those seven tools to now having over 130 connected tools out there, and a ton of iterations and updates to the software product along the way. We have a dedicated team of over 100 professionals across a range of disciplines driving the success of ONE-KEY. This includes Software Engineering, Product Leadership, Marketing, IoT Engineering, Security & Compliance, Customer Success, and Support.
The Three Biggest Challenges
AL: There were internal challenges, external challenges, and technology challenges.
The internal challenges were what I spoke about with IoT engineering, building a software firm, and weaving that into the product development lifecycle. But also, our field sales teams are very trained and adept at selling hardware products. So how do we start to understand the difference between a technology sale and a power tool sale? That commercial execution internally was a challenge we had to overcome.
Then you get the external factors. We pride ourselves on being disruptive innovators in our industry, and when you do that, you tend to be the world’s first at a lot of these different solutions, so that comes with unique challenges. The construction market historically is slow to adopt new technology versus other industries, so it’s a kind of old school, boots-on-the-ground approach. It’s really driving education and awareness partnerships throughout the industry, whether with end users or trade organizations, and then finding ourselves in a new space focused on construction technology and starting to build that credibility. It’s being on trade show floors and getting speaking engagements, and relaying our solutions to the problems that the industry is facing. And then lastly is technology in and of itself. Things change very quickly, from how you develop software to the connectivity technology itself. So staying abreast of the new technology, but also making the right bets — where do we want to invest? How do we focus and come at this from more of a platform approach, where this is going to be a ton of compound value, versus one-off decisions on each and every tool and the app itself?
The Smartest Thing We Did to Set It Up for a Successful Launch
AL: First and foremost was determining we needed to have a sub-brand under the Milwaukee Tool brand. With the sub-brand, we could really drill into the value proposition and the promise of that sub-brand, so as we continue to grow and scale, if you pick up a tool that had the ONE-KEY sub-brand on it, you know the promise of the brand and that it’s integrated with this software.
Software is a different animal. It changes and evolves. We update the app every two weeks, whereas a tool might come out once a year. So we needed an agile approach to get content and information to our end users. Creating a ONE-KEY support page, a resources page, and YouTube tutorial videos, and getting content and education to our users just as frequently as we update the app, was critical.
Metrics We’re Tracking
AL: A lot of times, our metrics go against traditional software KPIs — how long users are in the software or how to keep them in the software longer.
In fact, it’s quite the opposite. We want to know, if someone opens up the app, how quickly they can close the app because they got the information they needed.
One of the new practices we brought is the role of journey managers, looking at an entire journey of our end-users.
So we’re always out working with our partners, in their back office operations and on the job site, watching and observing. We’ve invested heavily in user experience designers and researchers, as well as product management. One of the new practices we brought is the role of journey managers, looking at an entire journey of our end-users. And then we can understand where a digital product can fit in, enhancing or automating various aspects of that journey.
Are we allowing someone to be more efficient? Are we driving visibility, and accountability, and communication between the field and the back office? Are we taking workflows that had a lot of waste and making them more efficient?
And then we’re segmenting our users — someone in the field versus someone in the back office. What are the key differences? What are their problems and challenges, and how fast are we able to solve those problems?
It’s really customer lifetime value — how much are they using the software, and how is it impacting their day? And from the field standpoint, are we making people safer and more productive?
Featured image source: Cyrus Crossan on Unsplash
