Understanding our customers: an obsession at Exotec

Paul Margot

Head of Product Management

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October 7,2026

Product management is a discipline born in the software world. At Exotec, we have adapted it to logistics industry, combining robotics and software. And that adaptation has taught us something essential about what it really means to build a good product.

Vision is worthless without priorities

Our product team is organised around two complementary roles. Product managers own the three-to-five-year vision: where are we going, why, and in what order. Product owners work day-to-day with development teams to translate that vision into concrete decisions and weekly priorities.

What connects these two roles is a shared conviction. In an environment as competitive as logistics robotics, focusing on a small number of well-chosen objectives is worth far more than spreading effort across too many simultaneous workstreams.

A team pulling in too many directions masters none of them. A significant part of our work, therefore, is about making choices and standing behind them.

Understanding the customer, genuinely

The principle sounds obvious. In practice, it is harder to uphold than it appears. In a technology company, the temptation is constant to build what the technology makes possible rather than what the customer actually needs. These are two very different questions.

We address this by maintaining close contact with our customers at every stage of development. Not only during the sales or deployment phases, but continuously.

The goal is to understand their real operational constraints, their frustrations, and the problems they have sometimes not yet found the words to describe. It is this sustained listening that makes it possible to develop features that genuinely fit the reality of a warehouse.

Two sources of innovation, one condition for success

The ideas that move a product forward come from two places. First, the market: customers express needs, raise problems, identify limitations. This is a direct and valuable source of input. Second, internally: R&D teams explore new technologies and conceive solutions that customers would not have articulated on their own.

But these two sources only work well when they meet. A technical innovation with no grounding in a real need fails to find its market. A customer need with no technological ambition produces only incremental improvements. The role of product management is precisely to organise that meeting point and ensure our teams innovate in a direction that creates genuine value.

What our customers actually expect

Beyond immediate operational performance, our customers are looking for a system capable of evolving with them: in volume, in the types of operations it supports, in their distribution model. Scalability and flexibility are not commercial arguments.

They are requirements embedded from the earliest design decisions, shaping our roadmap over the long term. Because understanding our customers is part of who we are at Exotec.

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