The strongest product roadmaps are designed with company values and mission in mind.
Don’t believe us? Just ask Kyle Lampe, principal engineer at Inspiren, a healthtech company focused on senior care. His team builds AI-powered solutions to support both senior citizens and their caretakers.
“We’re all about making sure seniors are getting the best possible care,” Kyle Lampe, principal engineer, said.
At Intenseye, an AI-powered platform designed to spot industrial worker safety issues, Director of Product Engineering Bugra Uluyurt and his teammates lean on company values, such as “care deeply,” to guide their decision-making. This approach empowers his team to deliver solutions with optimal impact.
“[The value] ‘care deeply’ shows up in our testing,” Uluyurt said. “We test our machine-stop logic against every case we can think of.”
We spoke with Lampe and Uluyurt about how their engineering teams integrate mission and values into everything they do, and how this benefits the product development process.
Inspiren is a healthtech company that provides the data operators need to make informed clinical and operational decisions for senior living care.
How does your team’s work connect to your company’s purpose?
My team helps build the AI that powers Inspiren's ecosystem of devices. We build a system that helps monitor the care being delivered to senior living. We know that by alerting when people need to be seen, not just after an emergency, we reduce falls and other harm for our seniors. In fact, we measure product success by years added to our residents' lives. The AI team builds the intelligence that can see a scene in a room and determine what is happening. This information, not the image, can then go to caretakers, keeping privacy but at the same time helping explain what is happening with seniors in our care.
What product decisions reflect your organization’s mission?
We're all about making sure seniors are getting the best possible care. In order to do that, we invest in technologies that are going to make both the seniors' lives better, as well as their caretakers. The best new feature we’ve brought to seniors is our AI care assistant. When seniors press their emergency call button, they now are able to communicate their needs directly to an AI agent, and that is conveyed instantly to their caretakers. Their caretakers can now prioritize people in medical emergencies over someone needing their nightly meds. Seniors feel more heard, as they can convey the urgency of their request.
How do you bring values into day-to-day engineering?
There are three things that I think about from my values: privacy, reliability and enabling caretakers with the info they need to deliver the best care. Privacy is at the heart of everything we do because we know we have to earn and maintain the trust of people who put sensing systems into their home. Reliability is super important because our tech powers the emergency call systems in senior living. Emergency call systems are obviously critical when someone needs aid. Finally, we think and care deeply about how the information and alerts we provide can enable caretakers to do their jobs more easily. When they are freed from many of the manual tasks of documentation or guesswork of running to each and every room, they can spend more time with seniors.
Intenseye builds an AI-powered platform for industrial environments, designed to improve safety, operations and quality management.
How does your team’s work connect to your company’s purpose?
Intenseye exists to keep people from getting hurt at work. Our computer vision models can spot a worker stepping into a forklift's path or working at height without a harness. My team builds the web platform that safety teams use every day and the software that runs on our Sentinel edge hubs. Our software shows people where and how risk accumulates, so they can act before it becomes a problem. We also build automations that trigger a flashing beacon, a spoken warning or a machine stop. It is our deeply felt mission that shapes our daily work. A clearer dashboard helps a safety manager spot a pattern before someone gets hurt. When we write logic that can stop a machine, we know it runs a few feet from someone's hands. That makes the edge cases hard to dismiss. We spend a lot of time learning how our users work, from environmental, health and safety managers and plant leaders to frontline teams. In planning, we ask, “Will this help more people finish their shift safely?” That question settles most debates.
What product decisions reflect your organization’s mission?
Machine control is one example. Our platform can connect to a customer's machine controller and stop a line when AI detects a person in a danger zone. Early on, we decided our software could stop a machine but never start one. When the hazard clears, we release the stop; a person on site decides when to restart operations. We never treat missing or unclear data as safe. For example, if a camera feed or connection drops, we send nothing new to the controller and raise a warning. A separate heartbeat tells the controller when we are no longer monitoring, so the plant's own safety logic can take over. Privacy is part of safety, too. We built anonymization that blurs a person's entire body, not just the face. Workers need to trust that the system is there to make their job safer, and a safety program depends on that trust. Our test mode runs an automation on the customer's real setup while withholding the final action. Customers can see what would happen before switching it on. Our goal is to empower safety leaders with confidence before a system takes physical action.
How do you bring values into day-to-day engineering?
Our five values are “build it,” “be on it,” show up,” “care deeply” and “raise the bar.” Here is where I see them in our engineering work: “Care deeply” shows up in our testing. We test our machine-stop logic against every case we can think of. We also run our automations against a real automation runtime and industrial controller emulators in the lab. Mocks can miss the failures that matter on a factory floor. “Raise the bar” means agreeing with product on a short, plain-language spec before writing code that touches a customer's machine. Reviews start with failure cases. A feature only counts as done when it works on site. “Build it” and “be on it” mean engineers own their work after release. They watch how it behaves in production and fix the root cause when something goes wrong. When a customer needs help, “show up” means the people closest to the code get involved. We document what we learn so the next person can build on it.
