391: Product VP of Wyze uses community for product innovation and you can too – with Steve McIrvin

How product managers can get customer insights from a community to create a competitive advantage Three years ago I was looking for a wifi camera I could put in our RV so I could check on our dog when we needed to leave her in the motorhome. The leading brand cost about $150. I tried a brand that was new to me offering a wifi camera for $29. It worked great with the cloud features I expected. This year I was looking for a robotic vacuum cleaner for our house. The highly rated and recognized brand was about $800. I went back to the company I got the camera from and learned they also had a robotic vacuum, complete with LIDAR, which I got on a Cyber Monday sale for $200.  I wanted to learn how this company creates competitive products, differentiating on cost while offering comparative capabilities that equate to much higher value for customers. Today, we get to find out together as the VP of Product for Wyze joins us. His name is Steve McIrvin and we met a few years as we both had kids competing in Science Olympiad. Before joining Wyze, Steve was last at Amazon. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:15] How does Wyze compete? Wyze is a home automation company that is community-driven. A group of passionate users in our social media and forum communities drives our roadmap and and helps us understand the problems we need to solve. From there, if we’re getting into a brand new category, we follow a fast-follower strategy. We help external engineers understand the product requirements and user needs and rely on their expertise. For our core business like cameras, plugs, and bulbs, we’re investing in internal innovation, especially artificial intelligence. We’re pushing the boundaries of computer vision and machine learning. For example, the Wyze Cam, a security camera, detects people, pets, and packages, and we’re beta testing face recognition. When our customers want a new solution, we try to find that solution, invent something, or enhance the features of an existing product. For example, people who had the Wyze Cam were looking for a way to power it, because they didn’t have an outdoor outlet near the camera. We came up with the solution of putting an adapter with a USB port in a light bulb socket. The light bulb still screws in the socket, and the USB port power the camera. We were extending an adjacent capability. This is the most fun kind of innovation—when you can quickly see a problem and immediately come up with a novel solution. [8:00] Tell us more about how you’re developing your core capabilities, especially AI visual recognition. One of our new service features is Wyze Anything Recognition. Training a computer vision model is very hard and usually requires an AI research team, but we wanted to make that problem accessible to anyone. Wyze’s tagline is to make great technology accessible. If you have a use case where you want your camera to recognize something, you can train it to do that. For example, my kids are always leaving their laundry in the washing machine, so I can put a camera there and train it to recognize the closed and open washing machine and trigger an alert when it sees an undesirable state. There are probably a hundred different problems like that around your home that you could use this feature to solve. We’ve done limited beta testing on the Wyze Anything Recognition so far, but the results have been good. We get suggestions that we can put in our main model, like people want it to recognize a dog barking or baby crying. When someone in our community takes a video, the app asks if they would like to submit the video to improve Wyze’s AI. A lot of people submit those, so we get the training data we need to make the program better for the community. [12:08] How did the community become a core aspect of Wyze’s strategy?