What the dashboard couldn't show me
I had usage data across an entire dealer network. It kept pointing at a gap I couldn't explain from a desk, so I went to go stand in it.
For just under 5 years, I was a product manager on the home automation team at Alarm.com — officially called the emPower team, with a charter of home automation. I ran product for the whole-home audio integration and the “Works with Alarm.com” program, which was the cloud-to-cloud integration side of the business.
Some of that work was further ahead of the market than the market was ready for. Two of the integrations got all the way to working proofs of concept: Philips Hue, and a Logitech Harmony integration. Neither one ended up shipping. The Harmony one died for a reason that had nothing to do with us — Logitech exited the remote control business entirely, and there was suddenly nothing left to integrate with. That’s the nature of platform work. You can build the right thing at the right time and still be waiting on a category that moves at its own speed.
That’s not why I left, though. What pushed me was the data.
I had the dashboard. Real usage analytics, across the whole dealer network, on features that homeowners would have paid for. And what it kept showing me was a gap: the capability existed, the demand existed, and the two weren’t meeting. Most people who tell you an industry is behind are guessing, or extrapolating from a couple of bad experiences. I wasn’t guessing. I was watching the actual behavior of an entire network, every day.
The features weren’t the problem. The platform could do the things. The gap was in the last mile — somewhere between what a system was capable of and what actually got sold, installed, and turned on in someone’s house. And I couldn’t see that part from where I sat. I wasn’t the one talking to homeowners. I wasn’t in the attic running the cable, or standing in a living room having the conversation about what a system should actually do.
So I went and became the dealer myself, to find out firsthand.
Years later, I understand that gap much better than I did from inside the dashboard. I’ve seen exactly where adoption breaks down in a real living room, with a real homeowner, in a way no usage chart fully explains.
None of which is a knock on Alarm.com. If anything it’s the opposite — you only get to see a gap that clearly from inside a company with that much reach and that much data in front of you. I didn’t leave because something was wrong with the half of the picture I was standing in. I left because I wanted to go stand in the other half.