Fernando Diaz was one of the first to join the Alhona team and the great challenge ahead of us. As the company’s CTO, his mission was clear: to create from scratch an innovative and valuable IoT platform for the industry that would solve the real needs of our customers. This was coupled with the challenge of creating a new team to build this product from the ground up.
Today, one year later, we can say that we are on the right track and working on the last stages of product development that will soon be on the market, with the MVP of the platform already built and with the first users giving us feedback to continue creating the product that our customers need and already demand.
Keeping in mind that Alhona has two distinct teams, consulting and product development, how do you think the experience gained from this consulting has helped in the development of the product?
Well, it has helped us a lot and in different ways, but it is curious to remember how in the first months of Alhona we were very afraid of mixing consulting with the product. First, because they are two teams with very different skills and ways of working, but above all because we felt that the consulting client could find a conflict of interest between these two areas.
Even so, it didn’t take us long to realize that, by fostering collaboration, we could generate great synergies that favored both initiatives. In early stages, the biggest challenge for startups is to validate hypotheses, and the most important one is that you are building solutions to real needs of your customers.
At this point, the synergy with consulting provides us with insights very high value insights, with the guarantee that our product is mainly driven by the real needs of the industry, while allowing us to access the market much faster and, therefore, learn and grow within it.
And, from a consulting point of view, do you think product development adds value?
Yes, it does. From the consulting point of view, this synergy has also borne fruit; in fact, the consulting clients themselves are interested and proactively ask us to see what we are building so that they can incorporate it into their businesses when it becomes available.
The great advantage that the consulting team gets is having a product made in Alhona, which makes it easier for them to provide an end-to-end service led by us. This allows us to not only become experts in the customer’s improvement spaces, but also to make sure that we can implement the technical solutions for greater project value realization.
In the end, what we get is not just selling strategy or technology, but selling value and impact to our clients, and not just in words, but with commitment.
What kind of product are you developing and what differential value does it bring?
Alhona’s vision is clear: “To provide technological tools and strategic knowledge to industrial companies to discover and exploit the hidden potential in previously untapped data”.
Within that vision, the product puts the tools’ part. Our vision for the product is also clear: we want to help companies make better decisions based on their data. In addition, at Alhona we strongly believe that IoT must be massive, for this we are building a platform that will be able to process a very high amount of data without our customers incurring disproportionate costs. We believe that current solutions do not meet this missive, which results in not being able to capture all the signals needed to get the full value out of the product.
And finally, do you think that, without these consulting insights, product development would be slower?
Absolutely. When you start to develop a product and find its market fit, it is very difficult to get quality insights until the first customers arrive.
When you work with a product philosophy, this is uncomfortable, it’s like trying to run a race with your eyes closed. The insights we get through consulting on a frequent basis remove this barrier to entry, giving us a lot of confidence and confirming that the direction we are going in is the right one.