Growing Your Business
Robbie Hobbs, Chief Product
Officer, WorkWave
How do you align long-term product strategy with a constantly evolving market and customer expectations?
Striking that balance starts with a deep understanding of the jobs we’re setting out to do for our customers—the outcomes they’re hiring our products to achieve; that’s our north star. We’re not trying to predict the future as much as we’re building the capacity to respond quickly to it. We continuously invest in customer discovery and outcome-driven innovation to ensure our long-term product strategy remains anchored to what matters most to customers, even as their expectations evolve.
We follow a disciplined approach to product strategy that distinguishes between enduring customer problems and fleeting feature requests. When a market change surfaces, we ask: “Does this change the problem we’re solving? Or the best way to solve it?” That framing helps us stay grounded in purpose while remaining agile in execution.
Our long-term strategy focuses on making repeatable work more intelligent, automating the mundane and enabling our customers to reinvest time and resources into growth and service quality. Consider how RouteOp completely redefines the way office staff plan routes and technicians interact with their schedules, simultaneously assuring the most intelligent route possible and turning hours of monthly work into just minutes.
Now, artificial intelligence (AI) gives us new tools to solve age-old operational pain points—faster, smarter, and more effectively than before—and brings a whole world of potential benefits to those working in the pest control space. We’ve already seen exciting results with early adopters of our Wavelytics™ platform, which leverages AI to put key insights front and center and maximize the impact of your efforts. By harnessing the latest innovations and applying them to solve real problems for our users, we maximize both customer return on investment and our own road map leverage.
How do you balance customer-centric versus product-led development and innovation while still keeping the voice of the customer central?
For us, development is a sequence, rather than a singular event. We start customer-first by falling in love with the problem, not the solution. That brings about a deep understanding of the customer’s context and defines a clear outcome they care about, allowing us to move into product leadership—taking responsibility for finding the best solution. That often means saying no to a customer’s feature request but yes to the underlying outcome they’re trying to achieve.
Being product-led doesn’t mean building in a vacuum. It means our teams are empowered and accountable for solving real customer problems in ways that are usable, viable, feasible, and valuable. Our job isn’t just to listen to customers; it’s to invent on their behalf, especially with new capabilities like AI that they might not know to ask for or process improvements that resolve problems they’ve yet to even identify.
We embed the customer voice continuously—not just in discovery, but in iteration. That includes regular outcome-based interviews, usage analytics, win/loss reviews, and closed feedback loops between support, product, and design. Focusing on customer input has been extremely valuable in the recent launch of our Wavelytics feature, allowing early adopters to drive actionable insights. Customer feedback has been instrumental throughout the process, with early comments highlighting pace of improvement as a source of excitement. The best products don’t just reflect customer input; they anticipate and exceed expectations.
What processes can drive go-to-market (GTM) and ensure cross-functional alignment?
Successful go-to-market is a team sport. We operate on a shared rhythm across product, marketing, sales, customer success, and operations to ensure we’re aligned not just on what we’re building, but why it matters and how we’ll bring it to market.
We use a “customer-backed” approach to GTM planning. Before we greenlight any release, we define the customer outcome we’re aiming to drive and work cross-functionally to ensure our messaging, training, metrics, and launch plan reinforce that outcome. This minimizes internal misalignment and maximizes external clarity for strong results.
We also treat launch as a process, not an event. We calibrate go-to-market in phases—first with enablement for internal teams, then controlled rollout to early adopters, and then broader release with rapid iteration based on real usage and feedback.
Most importantly, we hold ourselves accountable not just to ship features, but to deliver impact. We measure that through adoption, customer satisfaction, and, ultimately, customer profit. That keeps us focused on what matters: helping our customers grow their businesses and win in their markets.
