Making the Technician a Hero: A Product Manager’s Perspective on the Industrial IoT
By: Adi Soesan, Augury Product Manager
Developing a useful product requires knowledge of its potential users: Who are they? What is their daily routine? What are they able to do without the product? What do they need to do even better?
At Augury, we provide automated machine diagnostics solutions, working with facilities, service contractors and equipment manufacturers to optimize the health of industrial machines. We constantly meet with our end users — technicians, reliability managers, facility managers, and analysts of leading maintenance companies. And each time we meet them, we are reminded how proficient they are in their craft.
Product Management Basics: Know Your Client
Every technician we meet is a real pro. They can inspect a machine and quickly understand what’s wrong with it; they remember every important detail of each machine they’re in charge of and more. Their skillsets and level of know-how is truly inspiring.
This is where Augury comes in. Predictive maintenance (PdM) has been around for some decades now. That being said, we are starting to see a shift, bringing the maintenance industry to a state of transition towards recent innovation. Our goal at Augury is to develop powerful tools which will expand a technician’s traditional role. How, ? By taking traditional machine maintenance online and enabling real-time feedback with PdM.
Industrial Internet of Things: New Brand of Power Tool
Augury’s technology “listens” to machine vibrations to detect malfunctions. The vibration’s recordings are then uploaded to Augury’s cloud, where they are diagnosed by our algorithms and deliver real-time maintenance recommendations to the technicians.
This alone is a powerful tool, but in providing a diagnostic service, our goal is to provide our customers as much value as we can. This is why we designed our products to be a new brand of power tool for technicians: an instrument that gives them practical insights and more capabilities than ever before. Here are some examples:
- Next Level PdM: By using cloud services, we are able to give real-time diagnostics of a machine status, instead of waiting for the vibration analyst report which can take weeks.
- Diagnostic Insights: Augury’s products allow technicians to anticipate upcoming malfunctions long before they occur. Our insights can pinpoint the root cause of the situation and suggest best practices to prevent it from coming to fruition.
- Detailed Reports: With Augury, technicians and managers can keep track of the overall health level of multiple machines (in a factory, building, etc.) at the click of a button.
- Solid Field Assistance: Each dataset we record and analyze adds to our ever-growing database. This allows us to send the technicians feedback with solid analysis and recommendations for actions. If needed, one of our analysts will review a recording and send additional useful insights based on his or her experience.
All the capabilities mentioned above drastically improve work efficiency for machine technicians and their managers. More machines can be easily monitored, check-ups can be scheduled based on machine health status instead of routine, technicians can detect malfunctions faster than ever, and detect potential malfunctions long before they are created.
Delivering That Added Value
As mentioned above, technicians are very proficient in their work. Therefore, creating value through a new tool for the machine maintenance industry has its challenges. Still, the results speak for themselves: Augury’s products disrupt the current assumptions about machine maintenance practices and make the work easier and more efficient than ever before, while saving technicians’ valuable time to focus on other matters. This makes all the challenges of product development in Augury worthwhile and highly rewarding.
In many senses, being a product manager in a B2B company is challenging when you are aiming to solve real pain points felt by your customer. But once your end user understands the value of implementing cutting edge technology that comes with unparalleled support and response, they become true partners.
Originally published at medium.com.

