What my father's visor card taught a product executive

My father kept a laminated card in the visor of his service van with the fault codes for the four furnace brands he saw most often around Sedalia, Missouri. He had copied them by hand from manuals that distributors were reluctant to lend to a two-van repair business. On winter evenings in the 1980s I rode with him to farmhouses where a control board had stopped a furnace and the family was waiting in coats. When the code was on his card, we were home in an hour. When it was not, he replaced parts in order of price until the burner lit, and the family paid for every guess. I did not think of this as a product question until much later. I think of it that way now nearly every week.

I studied mechanical engineering at Brannock Institute of Technology and finished in May 1996. That July I joined Pellmont Compressor Company in Lima, Ohio, as a test engineer in its applications laboratory. Abner Fitch, who ran the laboratory, gave new engineers the same first assignment: tear down a hundred compressors returned under warranty and write down why each one failed. Fewer than a fifth had failed because of anything Pellmont had built. The rest had been flooded with liquid refrigerant, starved of oil, contaminated during brazing or cycled to death by a badly set control. I spent four years writing application guidelines for the equipment makers who bought our compressors, and I learnt that the most reliable part in a system can still be blamed for the system.

In October 2000 I moved to Dunsmore Supply Company, a family-owned heating and cooling distributor with forty-one branches across Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky, to run its technical services desk. I processed warranty claims, trained contractors and answered the telephone when a technician was stuck in an attic. Dale Wintersgill, who owned the business, told me on my first day that a distributor survives on the contractor's second call: the first sells the equipment, the second decides whether the contractor trusts you. We trained about 3,200 technicians a year, including for the federal move to 13 SEER minimum efficiency in January 2006. I saw how much of a product's reputation is made by the paper that comes with it and by whether a parts counter can find the right board.

Quenby Controls in St. Paul, Minnesota, hired me in January 2006 as a product manager for thermostats. I knew field failures and almost nothing about product management, so I learnt pricing, roadmaps and launches by doing them badly first and completed a part-time MBA at Calderbrook University in 2009. From 2011 I led Quenby's connected products, building a Wi-Fi thermostat platform and a contractor portal that reached 480,000 homes by 2016. The decision that shaped me most there came in 2014, when a utility customer asked for runtime data from every home in its territory. I argued that we should provide it only for homeowners who had enrolled, and we lost part of that contract. I still believe that was right, though I explain the reasons better now than I did then.

I joined Ambersley in August 2016 to lead product management for residential systems. In 2018 we launched a communicating control platform, and I made a mistake I later had to undo: I restricted its service app to our certified dealers, about a quarter of the contractors who installed our equipment. Independent technicians could not read our fault codes. I had rebuilt the problem on my father's visor card with better graphics.

Since becoming chief product officer in March 2021 I have spent most of my time on four decisions, each described on my impact page. I recommended stopping development of a new gas furnace platform in favour of a cold-climate heat pump and dual-fuel controls. I insisted on refrigerant detection in every ducted indoor unit for our move to a mildly flammable refrigerant. I chose to recall all the electric heat kits from a nine-month production run when only one supplier lot was clearly implicated. And I reversed my own 2018 restriction on service tools. Each cost money or share, and each was argued against by colleagues who were not wrong about the cost.

My working habits come from the field. Before any product launches, a technician who has not worked on it is given a unit with a planted fault and the published service information, and we time how long the diagnosis takes. If it takes longer than fifteen minutes, the launch waits or the documentation is rewritten. One Thursday a month I ride with a contractor, chosen by our distributors rather than by me. I ask my teams to bring disagreements to product reviews in writing, and I put the strongest objection on the first page of every board paper. People who work for me would probably say that I care more about the service manual than is fashionable for a product executive, and that I am slow to call a decision finished until the warranty data has had two winters to arrive.

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