April 2025
Clarity 👁️
Finally settled again after 2 weeks on the road for AMUG and Rapid (I really hope that sequence doesn’t happen again). Now that I’m here, I’ve got a sense of clarity of what we’re doing. We’ve got some staffing changes underway to reflect changes in priority:
Defense opportunity capture is really an engine now that needs much less maintenance. Exciting to see more opportunities being acted on
We’ve said goodbye to a true SaaS (software as a service) opportunity. We don’t think the majority of paying engineers just pick up a piece of software and run with it. We’ve run over 70 experiments to check whether there was a market, and there isn’t so we’re doubling down on working directly with companies – which we’re really good at.
The clarity in mind is reflected in the product too. In the last month we’ve added a number of changes that make the actions in our products much clearer. They include:
Threads - Updated 3D Commenting Experience: Super excited to highlight our new and improved 3D collaboration experience within Threads! The updated UI continues our efforts to make Thread quicker and more intuitive for our users to collaborate in the most efficient and important ways to watch their ideas become reality! The most exciting part about this is that the team came up with this themselves and executed on it in a 20% project. It involved taking this piece of the solution in house, so it wasn’t an easy lift.
Material Management - Modular Flows - Reconciling Pending Transactions for Multiple Builds: One of the more complicated details of our recent Modular Flow support is helping users to understand all of the deferred reconciliations that need to be completed so that all of your powder is correctly accounted for. We’ve built a couple of methods for communicating this to our users both in our Desktop and QR Apps. This communication enables our users to reflect on the information they need, when they need it so that they can work both smarter and faster.
As we heard at the conferences, there are a lot of changes afoot in the industry. High time too. A lot of companies are folding at the moment. Even though everybody speaks of a resurgence of manufacturing. I guess that’s just the way the hype cycle flows. Not with us though – a sense of clarity (extreme customer focus) has always pervaded what we do. We’ve sometimes taken the harder route as a result (no venture, for example) but given where everybody else is it does seem like we chose the right path. Excited to keep on treading it, together.
There are bank holidays galore in May (half of Europe is off right now, the British wait for Monday, and the Americans for the end of the month), so I hope you get some rest in after the stressful couple of travel months we’ve had. Don’t be a stranger though – be in touch!