Harmjan Derksen, Chief Product Officer, Ultimo. AI-augmented enterprise asset management (EAM) solutions for industrial businesses.
At 6:30 a.m. on a weekday, a team lead at a manufacturing plant is already at work. She is cross-referencing overnight breakdown reports, shift logs and open notifications, building a mental picture of the equipment before her technicians arrive. It takes her 45 minutes every single day.
No analyst report ever told me about that morning ritual. I learned it by standing next to her and observing it.
As a chief product officer, I used to believe that strategy comes from market research, competitive analysis and analyst briefings. Although those inputs matter, years of building software for manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, energy and utilities companies have taught me there’s a different layer to strategy. Enterprise software teams should spend more time observing end users than reading analyst reports. And industrial executives should demand the same from every vendor who wants their business.
The Stakes Are Too High For Secondhand Knowledge
For industrial CXOs, introducing software that lacks operational reality creates a financial risk. Research from Splunk and Oxford Economics puts the cost of unplanned downtime at $400 billion a year across the Global 2000, roughly $200 million per company. And ABB’s 2025 research puts the average cost of a single hour of downtime anywhere from $10,000 to $500,000 across industrial sectors.
The workforce math is just as unforgiving. Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute project that as many as 1.9 million U.S. manufacturing jobs could go unfilled by 2033 “if workforce challenges aren’t addressed.” Our own maintenance trend research found that 63% of industrial organizations are struggling with an aging workforce. Every experienced technician who retires takes decades of institutional knowledge with them—knowledge that exists in no system unless someone deliberately captures it.
Software built from a distance won’t solve problems that only reveal themselves up close.
What The Floor Teaches That Reports Can’t
Analyst reports tell you what the market is buying. The factory floor will tell you why products demand attention after they’re bought. Three lessons stand out from the time my teams and I have spent shadowing maintenance crews.
1. Workarounds are the truth. When a technician keeps a paper notebook next to a tablet, that’s unfiltered product feedback. The workaround shows you exactly where the software stopped fitting the work. You’re not going to find this often in a user satisfaction survey because people rarely report the friction they’ve already routed around.
2. Conditions change everything. A tool that demos beautifully in a conference room behaves differently at the top of a ladder, in gloves, next to a machine running at 90 decibels, in a corner of the plant with weak connectivity. If your product team has never watched software being used in those conditions, they’re designing for a facility that doesn’t exist.
3. Reality doesn’t care about your roadmap. I once presented AI capabilities at an industry conference, and a maintenance leader gave me candid feedback over dinner: What he needed was for his engineers to use their phones for work orders. Where I was talking about AI, he was still trying to solve mobile adoption. That gap between what vendors present and what customers are up against is where roadmaps go wrong, and it shaped ours more than any market forecast that year.
That dinner conversation is what listening looks like, but it’s not the whole roadmap. Innovation doesn’t always emerge from explicit user requests. The balance is staying grounded in what customers face, while still leading them toward what they haven’t asked for yet.
Observation also changes what you build. When our team watched that morning cross-referencing ritual up close at a European door manufacturer, the insight was humbling. The highest-value application of AI wasn’t an exotic prediction engine—it was automating the tedious assembly of information the team lead already trusted and giving her back nearly an hour a day. That priority came from the floor, not from a quadrant.
What Industrial Leaders Should Do With This
If you lead an industrial or healthcare business, you can turn this principle into procurement and operating discipline. Here’s my advice:
1. Ask every software vendor, “When did your product team last spend a shift with people who do this work?” Get specifics: which site, what they observed and what changed in the product as a result. Getting a vague answer can be just as telling as a fully detailed account.
2. Make a site visit part of your evaluation. Before signing, put the vendor’s product people, not just sales engineers, on your floor for a day. How they behave there tells you whether you’ve found a partner or sat through a pitch. A vendor confident in their product will welcome it.
3. Put frontline workers on the selection team. The technicians and operators who will use the software daily should have a real vote, not a courtesy demo. Systems chosen without them are systems worked around.
4. Measure adoption, not deployment. Go live isn’t success. Track whether people use the tool 90 days in and treat workarounds as defect reports. Usage data will tell you more than any steering committee update.
5. Apply the same discipline internally. Your IT leaders and digital teams should walk the floor regularly, observing and asking questions. The gap between IT strategy and operational reality closes one observed shift at a time.
The Takeaway
“Go and see” is a well-worn idea in lean manufacturing, and industrial leaders have applied it to their operations for decades. What’s missing is applying the same discipline to the software those operations depend on, and to the people who build it.
The next time a vendor shows you a roadmap, ask where it came from. If the honest answer is a stack of reports, be cautious. If the answer involves worn safety shoes, you may have found a partner who understands that in industrial business, the truth lives on the floor.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?