Transcript

Colin Uthe:

Welcome to Connected, a podcast about the operations and the people that make up Chamberlain Group. As we've stated before in this series, our access control software, myQ started in the late 2000s as an idea to solve a problem: You've already left your house and you can't remember if you've closed your garage, it was a simple problem with an appropriately complex solution. Nearly 15 years from its original concept, myQ is about to hit 10 million connected households, and this month we're taking time to celebrate this incredible milestone, but we're not planning to stop there.

If you've been following this series, you know that while our hardware remains our core business, myQ is our future, the ability to connect everything in our catalog and take access control to the next level, which is why in this episode we're speaking with a few different members from our ONETEAM that are hard at work on the newest features that will earn us the next million myQ connections.

Eric Chi:

Hi, my name is Eric Chi, I'm the director of software product management within the Connected Services Organization.

Colin Uthe:

Tell me a little bit about what the director of software product management does for myQ.

Eric Chi:

Yeah, so me and my team, we're responsible for the residential myQ app, so the ability to see what you have within myQ from a feature functionality, the ability to open and close your door, you get notifications, observing the live-stream within video, that all falls under my team from a development perspective and a product roadmap perspective.

Colin Uthe:

So I'd say you're on the front lines of that user experience.

Eric Chi:

Yeah, I think user experience is arguably one of the most important parts of my job, and so it's finding ways of working with my hardware counterparts as we come up with brand new hardware ideas and finding a way to deliver those great user experiences.

Colin Uthe:

You spent a lot of time at IBM, if I'm correct?

Eric Chi:

That is correct. So I came here from IBM. I spent about eight years with that great organization. The vast majority of that time was in IT consulting, and I worked on a variety of different projects. Some of that was within the IoT space, which was really fascinating, but then I also worked on projects for mobile apps, website design, database migrations, a large variety of IT-type projects that you get when you're at IBM. After a couple of years, I transitioned over into their Watson Health Group where I worked on AI product management, specifically developing a solution for prostate cancer and using computer vision AI to help radiologists detect prostate cancer.

Colin Uthe:

Wow.

Eric Chi:

That was an absolutely great experience, but what really interested me as I was starting to look for other opportunities is I really wanted to move toward a faster type work environment. And when you're working in IT, consulting some of those projects can take a year or two year before you see something actually deployed out into production. The same thing when you work on AI within the healthcare space, it takes a really long time to be able to launch. And moving into a much faster paced development cycle with two week sprints was something that really appealed to me.

Colin Uthe:

So you were with IBM for, you said eight years. You handled a myriad of different IT-related projects. Tell me a little bit about how you ended up at Chamberlain Group.

Eric Chi:

Yeah, so it's actually due to my father-in-Law. So a couple of months ago, he knows I'm very passionate about the smart home space, and he asked me for a recommendation for a camera and I said, "Why do you need a camera?" And he said, "Well, I want to put it in the garage because I never know if the garage is open or closed." And I was thinking to myself, and I said, "You don't actually want a camera. I mean, a camera helps, but if your garage is open and you're outside of the home, then you still got to turn around the car, you got to drive back home and you got to close the garage."

Colin Uthe:

Were you just thinking about that with your consultant brain?

Eric Chi:

No, this was just thinking about what was most effective for an end user at the end of the day.

Colin Uthe:

Right, you came to that solution on your own.

Eric Chi:

And I came to my solution and I said, "There's got to be a product out there that allows you to check the status of your garage door and allows you to remotely close it without having to drive all the way back home."

Colin Uthe:

Surely someone has thought of this great idea!

Eric Chi:

Surely someone has thought of this idea! And so that's when I started doing research and I realized there was a Chamberlain myQ product called the Smart Garage Control. And so I ended up buying it for him, for my father-in-Law. I ended up installing it for him, and we both thought the device was so cool. And then I bought a device for myself, installed it at my own home, and then my father came over and he thought it was so cool, and then we ended up buying it for him and installing it for him. So I'm directly responsible for three myQ owner connections even before I started working for the organization. And so when I started looking for jobs, it was very logical for me, given how much I love the smart home space to apply to Chamberlain at the end of the day.

Colin Uthe:

A smart home innovator and myQ success story right there, all bundled into one. That is a great story, thank you for sharing that.

Eric Chi:

Yeah.

Colin Uthe:

How would you describe the state of myQ when you first came on board back in January, and how has that changed in the 10 months that you've been here?

Eric Chi:

That's a great question. So I'd say at the beginning of the year we were about, for connected users, about 7.5 million, and we're about to hit 10 million and the year's not even over yet. So the growth that we've had has been absolutely phenomenal. And a large part of that is driven by a great user experience, but obviously a lot of the stuff that we're doing from a hardware perspective. So we have these connected garage door openers, all of our newest garage door openers have embedded WiFi that make a connection to myQ very simple and very easy. We already had a standalone camera, and one of the things that we launched earlier on this year is the video keypad. So the very first keypad that you have on the side of your garage with an embedded camera inside.

And so we're starting to work and develop brand new types of hardware that will really enhance our myQ ecosystem, and that's definitely the path forward as we try to continue, but how do we grow that user base with great experiences while also delivering brand new hardware that really allows them to expand inside their home.

Colin Uthe:

Right, right. And why is that number so significant? Why are we tracking connected users so purposefully?

Eric Chi:

That's a great question. I think for us, a connected user means a user with a device that has sent some sort of heartbeat within the past couple of days, and that's really important because connectivity is a huge focus of our organization. If you think about other smart home devices, they sit inside your home, they're probably such as your TV or your Alexa hub, very close to your WiFi router, but our devices sit predominantly inside your garage, which is a giant metal box-

Colin Uthe:

Right, that's a challenge.

Eric Chi:

... that wreaks havoc on your WiFi signal. And then we're also trying to place devices such as the video keypad at the exterior of your house, which is probably one of the furthest points from your wifi router. And so it's important for us to, in order to deliver great user experiences, to ensure those devices are connected to myQ and they can stay consistently connected, which is why it's such a huge focus for us. It also is a great measurement of tracking which users are actually churning and dropping from the ecosystem, and so it proves that we have a major focus on keeping our users connected.

The other thing about this is just the sheer number, 10 million is a huge milestone for us, and it tells, I think our competitors and the world, how big of a player we're starting to become within the smart home space. And admittedly, most of those connections are through the garage door, but we're starting to expand, as I referenced earlier, to other types of hardware products.

Colin Uthe:

Exactly. Getting that connection in the first place opens a lot of other opportunities for some products that we have already rolled out, some products that we are preparing to roll out and getting them in our myQ ecosystem.

Eric Chi:

Yeah. So I'd say in the future, video will continue to be a very strong emphasis for us as an organization. As I referenced, we have a standalone camera, some of our higher end garage door openers have an embedded camera inside, we have the video keypad, and I don't think it'd be a surprise to others to hear that we plan on developing more video-centric hardware as we continue forward.

Colin Uthe:

Right, so that's going to play a major role in the next million connected users that we are expecting too.

Eric Chi:

Absolutely. And the other thing I think about is, from a myQ perspective, we're trying to consider how we can give our myQ users a better understanding of who's coming and going to your home, and I think that's a major tenant of what we're trying to do. So one really great example is with the video keypad, you can actually create custom pins and assign them to different users. So instead of just getting a notification that says, "PIN 2348 opened the door," it's giving context. And if you've assigned that pin number to Colin, it's saying "Colin came home." And how do we give our users a better understanding of who's here, who's not? I think with the work that we're doing within the automotive space, that's a major part of what we're trying to do as we tie it all together.

Reshmi James:

I'm Reshmi James, senior engineering manager in the automotive team. I started out in Chamberlain in 2018 as an Android developer on the mobile app team. So the mobile app team is the force behind the myQ app. So I was an individual contributor, so I worked on, at that time, we were just forming into our emerging products, so we had nailed down garage door and gates and our bread and butter products, and we were exploring this world of locks and cameras. So I was responsible for integrating our new locks into the myQ platform. Then I progressed to being the tech lead on the team. And then in 2021 I switched to engineering management. So at that time it was a little scary, but now when I look back, I think it was one of the best decisions I've taken.

Colin Uthe:

Were you aiming for a management position or was it something that kind of found you?

Reshmi James:

It was something that just came to me. I was asked if I could take on this role, and I took it on. It was a leap of faith, but I'm glad I did it. It is definitely one of the most rewarding phases of my career. I've really enjoyed the role. I've really enjoyed being able to mentor and build up new teams.

Colin Uthe:

Had you managed a team before that?

Reshmi James:

No, it was my first experience.

Colin Uthe:

Do you currently manage a team in your new role?

Reshmi James:

So in my current role, I don't directly manage a team, it's just dotted lines to different engineering teams. But in my previous role as a software engineering manager, I managed two teams.

Colin Uthe:

Okay, so you've recently taken this skillset and moved into the automotive sector. So to put it bluntly, why is it so important to put somebody with a skillset like yours in the automotive sector?

Reshmi James:

So just as a background, if you think of the larger context, in the IoT world, we are moving from connected homes to connected cars. So previously, whatever we are doing with your phones to be able to control your devices, it's now moving to cars. Your car is your new phone on four wheels. So everything that we've been doing with the phone, we are now trying to do it through the car's dashboard. So whatever experience I have with doing this on the phone in the software space directly translates to what we can move to the car's dashboard. So that is why this skillset could bring in a lot of value to the automotive space.

Colin Uthe:

So it's been a few months since I've checked in with the auto department. What have you been working on lately?

Reshmi James:

Yeah, so this is a very exciting phase in the automotive team, it takes years to bring a project to life, and we're fortunate that two of our projects just came to life in the last two months. So we launched with Mercedes in September, and then with Honda in October. With Mercedes it's a very interesting integration, there's no UI, there's no visual display, it's entirely voice-controlled. So you can say something like, "Hey, Mercedes, close my garage door at home," and it'll go ahead and do it for you.

Colin Uthe:

Oh, wow. That's really cool. What did we end up doing with Honda?

Reshmi James:

With Honda, we have geofencing.

Colin Uthe:

And that's the ability to program the vehicle to automatically open or close the garage door based on where the car is located?

Reshmi James:

Yes. Each one is really unique, but we are really fortunate to have had three different launches this year.

Colin Uthe:

Yeah, that's a lot. And you guys are a pretty small team, if I remember correctly?

Reshmi James:

It is a small team, but a very passionate team. Very excited about everything that we just launched and everything that's in the pipeline.

Colin Uthe:

Well, it sounds like you're fitting in very nicely with the auto team. It sounds like they're expanding a bit on the resources, and I'm sure that's with a couple of even more exciting new features on the horizon.

Reshmi James:

Yeah, definitely. I feel like we've only hit the tip of the iceberg with what we have, the potential for what we can do with the vehicle, because we are already leaders in the garage space, and in the IoT space is huge. So I'm really excited for what's coming and I'm really happy to be part of this team at this stage.

Eric Chi:

For the automotive industry. I think what we're doing there is absolutely fascinating. I think it also proves that we are willing to work with external partners as we build out myQ. We're constantly having these sorts of conversations and negotiations with third parties, it's really quite complex what we're doing, and it's been great being able to work with these partners to deliver these premium experiences to our users.

One of the things that we're really excited about is when you take a look at the United States and Canada, there's about 67 million single family homes with a garage door, we have 10 million users. We can really expand and reach out into those other garage doors, especially because our Smart Garage Control hub that I referenced earlier on is compatible with older garage door models, it works on some universal radio frequencies that some of our competitors also use, and it gives you the ability to expand that pie.

So one thing that we're constantly asking ourselves is, "Hey, how else do we educate other non-myQ users about how they can connect? And so right now within our app we have a compatibility checker that allows you to tell if your garage door is compatible or not, but we're going to be delivering some AI powered capabilities using augmented reality that will allow you to scan your garage door opener unit, and you'll now know whether or not it's myQ-compatible.

Ben Hunt:

I am Ben Hunt and I'm a computer vision engineer at Chamberlain Group. So I work on a lot of computer vision projects for our various products. So that could be any sort of our person detection features that we have on our various cameras, and that also includes new undisclosed features that will be talking about probably later so-

Colin Uthe:

When they're ready.

Ben Hunt:

Yeah, when they're ready.

Colin Uthe:

Cool.

Ben Hunt:

Anything that our cameras can see, we eventually want to be able to tell you about what's there and be able to better inform our customers of what's going on in their space.

Colin Uthe:

You were an intern when you first came on board to Chamberlain Group, right?

Ben Hunt:

I was, 2016.

Colin Uthe:

2016. So what did you work on when you were an intern here?

Ben Hunt:

I actually worked on some computer vision projects. So in the group I was in, advanced engineering, we kind of act as the research and development arm of the company and we're looking at future technologies. And back in 2016, we didn't have any camera products, I believe, and so we were looking at different things that we could do with camera sensors, so not just wanting to make internet connected cameras that could record things, but what kind of things could they do for us on top of just recording video.

I was hired on in 2017 and in advanced engineering I spent a lot of time working on firmware. Some of this involved prototyping, some again, camera features, but a lot of it was also spent looking at building out our competency with various technologies, so I spent a lot of time working on various Bluetooth technologies, and I was one of the primary engineers on the myQ Pet Portal. So it was a lot of fun working with a lot of dogs. I will say as a customer, dogs are pretty difficult to work with. They have a lot of personalities that you have to try and design for. Trying to understand when they want to go out and when they don't want to go out and trying to give them that ability is not an easy thing.

Colin Uthe:

Your first year working, did you ever suspect you'd be trying to analyze dog behavior?

Ben Hunt:

No, no, not at all. And it's actually funny, that project started as an intern project, so similar to some of the things that I had worked on as an intern, this came out as an idea from some of our interns back in 2019.

Colin Uthe:

Fast forward a couple of years, what is it that you're currently working on?

Ben Hunt:

Currently I'm working on the vision-detection features that are necessary to make the GDO recognition work. We have that myQ Compatibility Chart. We have a chart of everything that our hub is capable of connecting GDO-operator-wise. At the moment, it's a fairly manual process where the user needs to find out some features and some identifying information about the operator that they have.

Colin Uthe:

So they're either pulling up a picture, maybe they're climbing up on a ladder, looking for a model number, any sort of identifying things, but that's a lot of effort.

Ben Hunt:

Yes, exactly. And we find that that's usually a point where people don't always spend the time to go about doing it. And so what we're looking at is with the least amount of effort possible, how can we get that information and how can we give them an accurate way for them to put that operator online?

Colin Uthe:

Yeah, and so to do that, we're just teaching a camera to recognize different GDOs.

Ben Hunt:

Yeah, exactly. So we're looking at identifying features of the operator. We're trying to correlate that against our compatibility list that we've already created, and we're trying to do a lot of that harder work for them. So all they have to do is point their camera at the GDO and it can tell them exactly what they need to do.

Colin Uthe:

After somebody's phone recognizes what GDO they have, what happens after that?

Ben Hunt:

There's a number of things that could happen depending on what we see. So we will try to direct the user to connect any operator of ours that has WiFi built in, and so we'll be able to tell them, "Hey, this is ready to go right now. Do you want to start that process?" Otherwise, we'll also let them know if it's compatible with our Smart Garage Hub, and we'll prompt them to pick it up if they want to go purchase that.

Colin Uthe:

So any level we can get somebody involved and integrated into myQ, we're going to take that opportunity?

Ben Hunt:

Yes.

Colin Uthe:

Why is this so important for what we're trying to do as a company to make access simple?

Ben Hunt:

For me, the removing those friction points to get the user informed is incredibly important in our path toward getting people connected. Because whenever I talk to friends to family, there's that first step of knowing that this is possible, and then there's that second harder step of knowing, "Okay, how do I get this? Can I do this with what I have? Do I have to buy something else?"

And usually changing something like a garage door opener, which is a fairly major and important appliance in your home, there's usually a lot of friction there. And so if we can more quickly tell people, "Hey, you don't have to change anything. All you have to do is maybe connect to WiFi, or purchase this hub that we sell and set up is much simpler than swapping out the entire operator. It won't get in the way of your daily life. It won't make it more difficult to get your car out of the garage," but being able to get rid of those friction points for the user and get them to a point where they can get their device connected and take advantage of the myQ ecosystem much faster, it's going to be incredibly valuable.

Colin Uthe:

Yeah, totally. And that's helping them get the most out of what they already own, and also inviting them into the other super cool features they could be getting with some of our other products.

Ben Hunt:

Mm-hmm. And maybe getting into some of our camera features!

Colin Uthe:

Exactly. Exactly. Getting into our camera features.

Eric Chi:

It's a great example of how Chamberlain is constantly investing and thinking about how we can better leverage AI and other sorts of technology and bring it into our ecosystem. I don't think Chamberlain is just a manufacturing company anymore. With the emphasis that we're doing within myQ, it really shows the investment in technology and the investment in software that we're trying to make.

Colin Uthe:

What would you say to somebody that is in that pool of 67 million households that own a garage door opener, but have not made that myQ connection yet?

Eric Chi:

It's a pretty simple response: "Aren't you frustrated with not knowing whether or not your garage door is open or closed when you're away from the home?" I think myQ really gives you some of the easiest capability is to just quickly check and understand whether or not your garage door is open and closed. And I think that's one of, if not the most predominant use case that we have for our users. And pretty soon we're going to be expanding upon that to give better users control of their access points and better understanding of who's coming and going and keeping their eyes on their loved ones. And I think that's a great reason why people should be downloading the myQ app. It's why people who are listening to this podcast should be considering whether or not they should be joining Chamberlain Group/myQ. Shout out to all the software developers. Really, we would love for more engineers to come and work with us on developing a best in class app.

Colin Uthe:

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Eric, for chatting with me today.

Eric Chi:

Thank you very much, Colin.

Colin Uthe:

Thank you for listening. Tune in next month to hear more stories of how all of us at Chamberlain Group are connected. This episode was written, recorded, and edited by me, Colin Uthe. Our producer is Megan McClendon. Our music was supplied by Envato Elements.