James Hendrickson of VERSES.AI On 5 Things You Need To Know To Create a Highly Successful App
An Interview With Hannah Clark, Editor of The Product Manager
The World is Full of Edges or All users are mobile. This might seem obvious, but thinking about everything as mobile-first is still not the default position for most development and UX teams. The world is full of edges meaning that workers or users exist at the edge of technology and the physical world. The physical world is dirty, messy, and filled with surprises. Most systems are designed from the core out to the edge. We design from the edge to the core because the messy edge is what we are trying to digitize. It is comparatively easy to design pristine cloud systems because you get to define the rules that govern your world. Products like SAP, Oracle, or MS Exchange get to define and control the rules of their world in a way that the edge applications can’t.
There are millions of apps out there. Many are very successful, but most are not. What are the steps taken by successful app makers that distinguish them from unsuccessful ones? In addition, many people have ideas for an app but don’t know where to begin. What are the steps you need to take to create a successful app? As part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing James Hendrickson.
James Hendrickson is President & GM of Verses Enterprise — Spatial Web for Supply Chain. VERSES Technologies Inc. (NEO:VERS) (“VERSES” or the Company) is a contextual computing platform provider with two solutions for the supply chain and logistics markets, COSM™ AI Operating System (AIOS) and Wayfinder™, AI-powered spatial picking software. Offering insight, prediction, and real-world optimization throughout the distribution center and warehouse, VERSES’ suite of technology aims to modernize the traditional approach to worker performance and experience, inventory and capacity planning and facility management and space utilization.
Hendrickson leads the company’s entry into the supply chain market. He has an accomplished background in both strategic and commercial leadership at the intersection of supply chain and technology, most recently leading Strategic Partnerships and Alliances for the robotics automation company Berkshire Grey. During his prior tenure with Honeywell, he led product development, engineering and channel teams who delivered solutions and built strategic partnerships that addressed a variety of supply chain challenges.
Thank you so much for joining us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you grew up?
I grew up in a farmhouse built in the 1800s in Chester County, PA outside of Philadelphia. We had five acres, a barn, and all kinds of places to explore, including a cemetery next to the house with generals from the Revolutionary War buried in it. Basically, it was an ideal childhood. In the mid-1980s, my Dad worked for AT&T and joined their new personal computer sales team. He brought home a brand new AT&T PC 6300 Plus with dual 5.25” floppy drives that he had to learn how to use.. That was then upgraded to add the 20MB hard drive! I want to tell you that I was immediately hooked but my parents had to beg me to play “World Tour of Golf.” That kicked off a lifetime of tinkering with computers but also a passion for connecting people and computers in a natural way. In college I majored in English and theater communications because computers and technology felt one dimensional at that time and grounding myself in the liberal arts would become really helpful (it was also a lot easier…they gave me a degree for reading books!!!).
Most of us have been around a lot longer than apps have. What were your hobbies and interests in your youth before anyone knew what an ‘app’ was?
My parents recently sold their house and in the process unearthed my childhood treasures, notably Konami’s Blades of Steel in the original packaging. I definitely spent a lot of time moving a virtual puck around a tiny little screen! Video games may have been the first apps I held in my hands. I disappeared into those small worlds. I would argue that books were the original app (portable, immersive, isolated and somehow shared as well). Favorite titles growing up included: Count of Monte Cristo, everything by Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton, and books about hockey and soccer.
It has been said that our mistakes are our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘takeaways’ you learned from that?
This is from my earliest days of using computers probably in 1988. I was tinkering with my computer and ended up deleting the autoexec.bat file. In DOS this batch file controlled things like what your prompt looked like and what programs launched when you booted up. I was in complete panic because I thought I had broken everything on the computer (in reality I just changed the Command Line from <C:\> to <C>). Pre-Google, such mistakes could only be fixed by figuring it out yourself or finding a smarter friend to ask. I spent forty-eight hours in distress before my dad took pity on me and asked the “computer guy” from work to call me. We fixed the prompt in Autoexec.bat and put the computerverse back together in about two minutes. I learned two valuable life lessons: 1. Tinkering doesn’t do permanent damage and 2. Curiosity opens doors to everything you don’t know you don’t know. Ask for help from yourself, from others, from Google. Everyone loves being asked for help from someone motivated by curiosity. Also, for those still running DOS 5.0, the command is PROMPT $L$P$G.
I tend to meet two types of app developers; people who are passionate about app development and technology and people who started an app because they saw it as a means to solve a problem. Which camp would you put yourself in, and how did you arrive there?
I think the answer for successful app developers is always a combination of the two and that you have a tendency towards one camp or the other but it is never all or nothing. I’ve always had a passion for solving problems with technology but I’ve also always taken a wider view of technology than just the digital technology that we have today. Books and the printing press are still the most powerful technology in world history but today most people wouldn’t consider a book technology.
For me this is always about solving problems in novel ways. My career has been spent bringing technology into industrial environments which I find to be so satisfying because you get to build apps that can quite literally change the lives of workers. From making their jobs safer, to making them faster, and more efficient, to allowing them to get paid more and finish work early, apps in industrial environments change lives for the better. I also love that you have a number of different users in enterprise environments and the decision makers are almost always different then the app users. This means that in app development for enterprises you already have more empathy for your users than in other areas because you are looking at the UX from at least two perspectives. For me, the more ways you look at the problem, the more empathy you have for the users as a whole. If you haven’t look at a problem from at least five different perspectives, you haven’t really looked at it.
Entrepreneurship is a marathon, not a sprint — though I suppose sometimes it’s both at the same time. What kept you motivated to develop your first minimum viable product, and how have you kept your momentum since then?
I talked about this earlier, but the biggest thing for me is that if we do our jobs well, we are literally changing the life of a worker. We are providing technology for a worker to be able to meet his or her performance goals and get paid the full amount owed to them. Our apps empower workers to generate shared prosperity. In a world where workers are expected to do more and more for less and less pay, our apps begin reversing those trends by putting performance back in the hands of the workers. If your mission is to change the world by elevating human potential through intelligent tools that radically improve our mutual understanding of the world then it is easy to sprint your way through that marathon.
Ok, thank you for all that. Now let’s shift to the main focus of this interview. Can you tell us a bit about your app? How does it help people? What do you think makes it stand out? What are you most proud of?
We have a number of different apps in our portfolio at VERSES.AI but let’s talk about WAYFINDER. WAYFINDER is a mobile application that utilizes some new IEEE standards for computing in multi-dimensional space. WAYFINDER guides workers through their actual environment and through their tasks based on what we call a world model of their space. This world model is a computer addressable coordinate system that the worker moves through both virtually and physically. This lets us do real-time modeling of the best path for the worker based on actual conditions. We can also run simulations in advance or in real-time to model the behavior of all the elements in the space.
We believe that the definition of an “App” is shifting from being something that you run on your phone to something that is more like an agent that works on your behalf to solve problems for you. This shift is occurring in part because of the shift in standard modalities that are required today and because of some of the incredible progress we are making in AI. Our app model is shifting to a model of Intelligent Agents that can be deployed in our applications or integrated into other applications or made available in larger platforms. This means our tools exist more as hyper-personalized microservices than like traditional applications. Our customers need to be able to run technology on the desktop and mobile computers they have today as well as on head mounted displays that they believe are coming. We believe this shift towards ambient or ubiquitous computing with unlimited portability is inevitable and the right one, but it also means that the idea of building apps for just Android and iOS feels remarkably simple.
Our customers are also drowning in the data that they’ve been collecting to use in the future. The trend of Big Data collection is like cryogenics where people freeze their bodies for the future when we can unfreeze them AND cure their illnesses. In the meantime, we have to store the frozen bodies for the hope of the future.
We are finding that customers need to tackle their data problem before they can begin solving problems at the edge. Our team has had good success implementing a data coherency fabric that connects all customers systems into a stream of data that is understandable across all systems.
Approximately how many users or subscribers does your app currently have? Can you share with our readers three of the main steps you’ve taken to build such a large community?
We have several thousand users on Wayfinder today and many F500 customers in late stage pilots. We also have some key partnerships that will expand our reach and scale our adoption.
The 3 biggest things we’ve done to build the base we have are:
- Deliver mind-blowing technologies that solve problems now and into the next 5 years — You need to be able to see around corners and deliver something that solves problems today.
- Reflect empathy for your users, customers, partners, and staff in your tools and products
- Practice radical Integrity — at the end of the day people always buy from people, so your personal and company brand matters as much as much or more than the product vision that you have.
What is your monetization model? How do you monetize your community of users? Have you considered other monetization options? Why did you not use those?
We’ve started with a SaaS model that also combines a usage model which is working fine; however, as an occasional buyer of technologies, these models never feel right because of the complexity required of the buyer to understand the models. I prefer things much simpler. Major new technologies like we have are never one dimensional in their innovation, so we should anticipate parallel innovation in our go-to-market and pricing strategies. Our team is currently tackling how to innovate our product pricing and deployment, and that challenge is what makes the full product launch so fun–we discover new things every day!
Can you tell our readers about the most unconventional tactic you’ve used to test, market, or gain feedback on a product? What did you try, what was unique about it, and what was the outcome?
There was a time when I saved an engineering team six months of work thanks to a two-day hustle, annoying nagging, and some dumb luck. I had a major customer demo scheduled, and I went to our engineering team with the urgent request to build a text message feature into an application. I was sure it would wow the customer. Engineering estimated my requested feature would take six months. With my demo just days away, I switched into begging mode and got my great engineers to hack something into the application. Full credit given to all the engineers who push back on product demands because they are committed to delivering industry ready code for production. My request for hackathon mode was unorthodox to their taste, to say the least! Turns out, when I demoed the feature the customer said, “That’s really cool, but we would never use that because….” That feedback wowed us, not the customer, and it helped us redirect our future efforts into making a product that would really work for them. Taking a chance on a test feature and relaxing our expectations in order to float a working model rather than a perfect product saved us six months of wasted labor. We were able to show the customer something and listened to them tell us whether it worked or not before we made incorrect assumptions and overcommitted resources.
What are some of the strategies you have used to improve your products and build on their success?
In the enterprise space, consistency is king, so once you have an established product with established features it is very hard to do radical redesigns or changes without creating user confusion. This means that features become smaller and more iterative as the product matures.
I’ve found that building new products for different markets often using new toolchains or technologies is a great way to innovate. Your dev teams need to explore new tech anyway in order to stay relevant and because they are naturally curious, so doing an innovation project to explore an adjacent market with a new product is a great way to do that without spending a fortune. You can fail fast without risking the business because in that market you aren’t losing anything. For the projects that are successful you can pull the features back into the core product after you mature them in the new market. In my opinion, this gives you the best of both worlds where you get to explore new tech and new industries without risking your current business.
Another thing I love doing to improve products is around building a stronger team to work on the products. When we focus in this area we always write a “Why Statement” that we regularly revisit with the team so that everyone knows Why we are building the product. When a new person joins the team the team reviews the why statement with the new team member. This does a few important things:
- The team is never unclear about what they are building and what the motivations are
- Any member of the team can answer questions around the product strategy should an executive ask them
- The team has deep empathy for the customer and the customer problem and they begin proactively building new structures to solve problems or create new features based on their OWN experience.
Thank you. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to create a very successful app? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.
1 . The World is Full of Edges or All users are mobile.
This might seem obvious, but thinking about everything as mobile-first is still not the default position for most development and UX teams. The world is full of edges meaning that workers or users exist at the edge of technology and the physical world. The physical world is dirty, messy, and filled with surprises. Most systems are designed from the core out to the edge. We design from the edge to the core because the messy edge is what we are trying to digitize. It is comparatively easy to design pristine cloud systems because you get to define the rules that govern your world. Products like SAP, Oracle, or MS Exchange get to define and control the rules of their world in a way that the edge applications can’t.
2 . Technology Vanishes or Natural UX is required.
The father of ubiquitous computing, Mark Weiser, said, “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” When you are building mobile applications your goal needs to be on the most seamless experience possible and then push yourself to go further. We already said the edge is messy, so we have an obligation to our users to simplify that convergence of technology and the physical world. We need to fiercely defend our users’ right to a simplified experience. This is even more important in the enterprise because users are workers who are paid based on their performance so our beautiful interface has to improve their job and can’t exist on its own. For example, we have a voice interface in our application that serves as an expert mode so the workers only occasionally look at the application.
3 . Nothing else matters or Productivity Rules the Day
This is especially true for enterprise applications because if the app doesn’t lead to greater productivity or output then it probably isn’t worth doing. This also applies to games and trivial apps as well except in their case the productivity goal isn’t an output but is a chance to refresh and renew the user through play and relaxation. I don’t think I’d say that productivity and play are the opposite of each other but you can’t be an effective person without moments to unwind, recenter, and reflect on our experience as humans.
Since I primarily work in the enterprise, a cool app that doesn’t improve productivity is a non-starter. If the app isn’t better than the next best alternative (NBA) it isn’t worth doing. This should be an early signal to quit or pivot if you aren’t improving worker productivity.
4 . Your tail doesn’t wag their dog or Systems interoperability is critical.
Edge applications are incredibly important but they aren’t going to influence the design of major backend systems like Azure, AWS, SAP, or iCloud so your amazing edge application needs to be fully interoperable with the other systems that already exist. Working at the edge is really hard, so if the app user is in any way slowed down by the other systems in the loop, we have failed them. This performance around systems interoperation needs to be top of mind.
5 . Think like a coach when collecting data
On the enterprise side, I’ve been thinking about industrial workers as industrial professional athletes and professional athletes always have a coach. When building mobile applications, it is critical to collect data with the sensitivity and the focus of a great coach. The application should be designed to create ongoing incremental improvement based on the data that is received at the edge. For the first time in the history of the world, we have the opportunity to know exactly what is happening at the edge and to create personalized coaching to the edge user. This creates a powerful relationship between the application and the user and drives ongoing performance and improvement.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
What an amazing question. The hardest part will be narrowing it down to just one!
The biggest thing that comes to mind, is to start a movement for companies to build their businesses around stakeholder value and not primarily shareholder value. Shareholder value looks right on paper but running your business entirely on this can allow us to rationalize destructive behavior in the name of profit. I believe that addressing this problem also addresses executive pay, worker pay inequalities, environmental damage, corporate innovation, and many many more things. It is much harder to measure but the ability to measure an increase in goodness would be worth the effort.
We aren’t so naïve to believe we can change the world, but we are just naïve enough to believe we have to try!
How can our readers further follow your work online?
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
About the Interviewer: Hannah Clark is the Editor of The Product Manager. With a background in the tech and marketing spaces, Hannah has spent the past eight years coordinating, producing, and curating meaningful content for diverse audiences. Great products are at the heart of her life and career, and it’s her mission to support current and future product leaders in an ever-evolving industry. Read our latest insights, how-to guides, and tool reviews at theproductmanager.com.
