Luuk Steitner joined us to chat about product management and his mission at Spinn Coffee.
Heather: Hi Luuk! What’s your role on your team, and what product are you building?
Luuk: My role is VP of Embedded Software & Electrical Engineering at Spinn Coffee. The product we built is a coffee maker, it's completely different to all the other coffee makers in the market. With this machine, you can make any type of coffee from espresso to regular flat drip coffee and even cold brew. The nice thing about these machines is that you can make so many different types of coffee, but it gets a bit complicated in the firmware on the machine. My goal was to make the software much more flexible and future-proof, so changes to recipes or any behavior of the machine would be very easy to implement without the need of rewriting software. Our barista uses this software to design new and improve existing recipes, while other colleagues use it to design better cleaning routines.
While software is an important part of what my team does, the electronics design plays a very important role. Electronics has gotten a bit complicated because of the chip shortage, but it's not only chips. Many other components and even connectors are also facing shortages, so we have to be very creative with our electronics architecture to make sure we act in time when a component is running out of stock but more importantly, anticipate shortages so we can maneuver around them. And, we are working on a new version of the machine that's going to be faster, better & cheaper.
Heather: If you’re successful in your mission at Spinn, how will the world look different?
Luuk: One thing we are trying to do is to get rid of pods, because many people use pods, and we want to be more environmentally friendly. So with Spinn you don't need pods and the waste from the machines can be used as compost to feed plants in your garden.
We are also trying to get more into the right to repair movement with the next iteration of our machine to make it easier for customers to make repairs themselves.
Heather: How did you get into IoT?
Luuk: I've always been into electronics and software development. At some point I started my own company with two associates and we developed all kinds of consumer electronics. Of course customers want the products you make to be connected so we made many IoT products.
Heather: What advice do you have for aspiring product leaders?
Luuk: With leaders, the way you work with the team is important because people mostly think top down, like the people below you work for you. But I see it as if it was all the way around. So if you want to be successful with your team and whatever you do, you actually go stand beneath your team and support them to make sure they can do what they need to do. This will help your team get better results faster and it is greatly appreciated by the team members.
Heather: What’s your greatest product achievement?
Luuk: What first comes to mind is Spinn’s embedded software suite that helps us being so flexible in new firmware and recipe releases. But on the other hand, what we did with the electronics may be a greater achievement. When the chip shortage suddenly hit and we could no longer purchase the main CPU and other critical components, it could have meant the end of the company. But we were able to deal with it fast and came up with a new architecture that made the critical components obsolete. We had the new design in production within a few months, before the previous version ran out of stock. This was of course a very exciting time for Spinn and things would have looked very differently now if we weren’t able to do this.
