Tech leaders are ready to move forward — from the pandemic, from complacency, from 2021.
If we’ve learned anything from the last two years, it’s that game-changing technology that transforms how we conduct our lives is not as impossible or far-off as we previously believed. The global shift to remote work has encouraged innovation and creativity from all corners of life, and the lightning-fast development of mRNA vaccines showed just how quickly the tech industry can develop under pressure.
But with so much of 2021 focused on adaptation rather than acceleration, the world is excited to see what the tech revolution has up its sleeve for the next 12 months. From biotech to remote technology, the industry has proven its ability to change the world — so what comes next?
As the new normal indeed became normal, the global focus for many businesses shifted toward sustainability, agility and empathetic leadership.
Now a new year is on the horizon and companies are already planning ways to leave their mark. Built In San Francisco caught up with five industry leaders to talk about the projects they are most excited about launching in 2022 — and the impacts they will have on consumers.
What’s the coolest project your team has planned for 2022?
My team is working on Pelican, a high-resolution, state-of-the-art small satellite platform that will begin launching in 2022, to be operational in 2023.
The pace of change in space technology has been staggering in the last decade, with innovation and trillions of dollars spent in consumer, medical and automotive technology often spilling over to the space sector. Pelican will be equipped with battery technology from the automotive sector, cameras and sensors from the medical imaging sector, computer and storage systems from the mobile and gaming sector, and 3D printing technology. This latest and greatest technology needs to be robust, reliable and able to survive for many years in the harsh and stringent environmental conditions of space that satellites are exposed to everyday.
While Planet doesn’t reinvent physics when it comes to satellite technology, it has pioneered agile aerospace and continues to make revolutionary strides when it comes to the art of designing small satellites. Pelican will revolutionize the high-resolution earth observation market, both in terms of the technology and the value it provides to customers.
How will this project help you grow professionally or develop important skills?
After having worked on the Doves and SkySats, Pelican provided an opportunity to start from scratch (so that we always keep up with the pace of change of technology) and envision a satellite that is state-of-the-art in the 2020s.
When you are working on a new satellite platform, it is tempting to change everything because it is cool and you want to use the latest and the greatest, but it is equally tempting to shy-away from changing anything because of the need to be risk-averse and ensure success on the first attempt. Satellite design is really exploring the “art of the possible” and making sure we deliver the most value to the customers who rely on Planet to continue to define the satellite remote sensing world.
There is a strong but healthy tension between the space systems team, who focuses on a capabilities-driven approach to problem solving, and the product team, which uses a more customer-centric focus. With Pelican, I am continuing to learn the art of balancing the creation of a technology portfolio that stays relevant for the next 10-12 years while continuing to provide value to our customers to make change visible, accessible and actionable.
Detailed information delivered at the current pace of change in the world will be a game changer for customers.”
What impact will this project have on your business and customers?
Today, customers interested in remote sensing data have to wait hours to task a satellite to collect an image, for the satellite to acquire the image and finally have it downlinked and delivered to them. Detailed information delivered at the current pace of change in the world will be a game changer for customers, who every day need to make quick, consequential decisions.
The high-resolution, rapid revisit, low-latency Pelican constellation, when paired with Planet’s full suite of daily, global monitoring data and analytics solutions, will enable powerful new insights that drive unparalleled awareness and decision-making for our users working in government, sustainability, finance, insurance and more.
What’s the coolest project your team has planned for 2022?
As the world shifts to more sustainable sources of transportation, Volta’s electric vehicle (EV) charging stations are designed to provide convenient, reliable charging that fits seamlessly into your daily habits and routines. Our stations are front and center at your local grocery store, your pharmacist and your favorite neighborhood movie theater. As more people no longer have to go to a gas station to fuel up — and instead fuel up at the places they already go — this shift in consumer habits and behaviors presents major economic opportunities.
For the retail and real estate locations we partner with, Volta’s eye-catching digital displays and premium locations help drive business by attracting loyal customers— and that’s where my team and some of our most exciting projects come in. In 2022, we’re planning to work on quantifying and understanding these evolving customer habits. We want to continue providing a best-in-class EV charging experience and bring sustainability-oriented customers to our site partners.
How will this project help you grow professionally or develop important skills?
I love our customers! They help us prove that an EV lifestyle doesn't mean going out of your way to help the planet — it can be effortlessly included in your daily life. I always keep an ear to the ground and in 2022, I’m expecting the shift towards electric mobility to continue accelerating exponentially. This project will help me identify evolving customer needs and the impact they’ll create.
An EV lifestyle doesn’t mean going out of your way to help the planet — it can be effortlessly included in your daily life.”
What impact will this project have on your business and customers?
One of the main reasons that Volta's charging network topped the 2021 JD Power EV Experience for Public Charging is because we put our customers’ needs first. I think excellent customer experience and business principles are not a destination but a journey, well informed by facts and feedback. This project will provide unrivaled access to insights that will inform our journey over the next several years.
What’s the coolest project your team has planned for 2022?
One of the most exciting projects my team is currently working on is the evolution of personalization within the discovery+ application. Launched a year ago, this is our flagship streaming product across all connected devices. Based on the users’ watch history and personal interests, we build recommendation engines using state of the art deep learning models. These machine learning models are complex, and building them requires big data and processing at regular intervals, served at scale and with the lowest latency. We are working on building end to end machine learning solutions to entice our audience.
How will this project help you grow professionally or develop important skills?
As part of a rapidly growing team, we own complex systems that will provide a personalized and unique experience for millions of users across over 200 countries. We are responsible for building a scalable Machine Learning (ML) platform that will be used to train, evaluate, deploy, serve and monitor traditional and deep learning ML models and manage data.
While I have extensive experience building machine learning systems at scale, my experience was primarily in the e-commerce space. One of the most exciting and attractive aspects of this role is that we’re working with extremely rich metadata and one of the largest and most diverse content libraries in the media. While recommendation and personalization systems are important in e-commerce, Discovery considers building machine learning systems at scale in that area to be critical to a great consumer experience, and key to driving customer engagement.
Providing personalized experiences increases customer engagement and helps our customers find the most relevant and interesting content.”
What impact will this project have on your business and customers?
The discovery+ product offers an extensive range of content and user experiences ranging from classic lean-back viewing to interactive learning applications and everything in between. We build for connected TVs, web, mobile phones, tablets and consoles for a large footprint of Discovery-owned networks and brands across multiple genres (Discovery, Food Network, Golf TV, MotorTrend, Eurosport, Discovery Play and many more).
Providing personalized experiences increases customer engagement and helps our customers find the most relevant and interesting content. Our expert editors spend a significant amount of time curating meaningful content experiences within the product. As we scale both our global viewership and content volumes, it becomes impossible to manage content manually. Our goal here is to automate this process through ML, creating an even richer viewing experience. With machine learning algorithms in search, recommendation and personalization, we can deeply personalize content on our platform for every user.
What’s the coolest project your team has planned for 2022?
At Twin, we are humbled to be using cutting-edge technology to reverse and prevent chronic metabolic diseases. A happy and healthy member is at the core of everything we do at Twin, and I am so excited to work on productizing more of our state-of-the-art machine learning recommendation and personalization technology in 2022. Through simple mobile app experiences, members will be empowered to achieve their health goals even more easily with Twin.
The project is so interesting because it touches a lot of aspects of ergonomic product design and development, which can be exciting and challenging at the same time. Simplifying a piece of complex health care technology to be consumable by anyone is an art and science that needs the essential ingredients — the right user experience, empathy, relevance, safety and delight.
A happy and healthy member is at the core of everything we do.”
How will this project help you grow professionally or develop important skills?
While user empathy and user-centered design are touted as table stakes for any successful Product Manager, this project is going to test our team on how well we utilize these essential concepts to build the experience. We will need to consider how the project will not only resonate with the member, but also appear as a seamless and cohesive experience to sit alongside the existing micro-experiences that we already have in the app. I am confident that this project is going to help me to grow to become a better Product Manager, and force me to challenge the status quo while navigating timelines, expectations and resource limitations.
What impact will this project have on your business and customers?
With this project, Twin members are going to get timely and highly relevant information about their health progress, which will help them stay on track to heal faster and to get to a reversal path sooner. Members will benefit through the personalized recommendations that will reach them in a contextual and timely manner, not only delighting them, but also helping them take required actions to achieve their health goals faster.
What’s the coolest project your team has planned for 2022?
From my perspective, the coolest project we have planned for the next year is the scaling out of our internal machine learning platform. We are designing the infrastructure to standardize and automate how we deploy machine learning models on AWS, so we can rapidly move from idea to proof-of-concept to production. This is exciting because it will allow us to help other teams within Verana train and deploy machine learning models to solve a wide variety of problems.
How will this project help you grow professionally or develop important skills?
This project will help all of our engineers strengthen their Machine Learning Operations (MLops) skills, which are vital to deploying and maintaining machine learning applications in the real world. We are also working with some large datasets that offer unique challenges for engineers to sharpen their skills with big data tools, including AWS EMR, GLUE and Athena. Since we are building our machine learning ecosystem with AWS SageMaker, engineers working in our teams will have the opportunity to learn and apply cutting-edge techniques in distributed training to build large-scale machine learning systems.
Our platform will help keep our customers and business at the forefront of the field of machine learning”
What impact will this project have on your business and customers?
Our machine learning platform will have a large impact on our company by expediting how quickly we can create our AI-powered tools at Verana. This platform will also benefit our customers and collaborators by offering advanced analytics that will help consumers realize the full potential of their data, while still keeping it safe and secure for regulatory compliance. Overall, our platform will help keep our customers and business at the forefront of the field of machine learning by powering our VeraQ engine.
