At City Electric Supply's CES Connect event in Nashville, Trade Hounds VP of Marketing Jeanette Abrahamsen sat down with Kevin Kosobud, Chief Product Officer at Intermatic, to discuss how customer feedback is shaping the company's product strategy.
In this conversation, Kevin shares how the company builds its product roadmap, where AI fits into that process, and what's coming next for Intermatic.
Other distributors in the industrial space, they've done [events like this] as well. The thing I like about City Electric is that it really feels like a partnership with their suppliers and their partners. They feel like they can't be successful without us, and we feel the same way.
It doesn't feel like they're trying to dictate to the suppliers what to do. For us, that's super refreshing. And because we want to partner with them, we want to grow with them.
My team is responsible for all the products that we sell. I have the engineering team, the product management team, and the marketing team. We are coming up with new products that the market needs and that we want to solve their problems with. We want to make it more efficient to do their job.
Being here and talking to a lot of the associates at the branches, we start to hear about their customers and the challenges they have. That comes to us, and that's how we really develop our product roadmaps.
We have to be at these types of events because if we don't do this, we're not going to know what the market wants. There's no way we're going to be known as the company with reliable, simple solutions. That's our legacy, and we can't let that go. But at the same time, we also have to add innovation.
That's what my team is here to do: listen to their associates, listen to the branches, understand what their customers really need, and then we can put that into our development and bring it to market.
We're known for electronic timers. We're also known for photo controls and surge products. Right now, those are key products in the electrical category, and they're all going to continue to be based around those same areas.
What we're starting to see is the migration of end-user needs to add more functionality to the surge product and more functionality to a photo control. What we're trying to understand is where we can put that together and where it makes sense for the customer to use it in their specific application.
We'll come here and talk to them. Then our team will actually go out in the field where an electrician or a tradesperson is doing his or her job. We'll watch and see how they're doing it, and then we can take that challenge or frustration and put it into our product and bring that to market.
I think a couple of things that are super important for us are: how do we make it more efficient for our end users to do their job and do it faster? Every industry is struggling with labor. We don't have enough people to do all the jobs.
As we look at the products that we're developing, we're always asking: how can they do this task that was traditionally done in 30 seconds? Can we allow them to do it now with this solution in 10 seconds?
That's a big focus for us: looking for those efficiencies that can help them be more productive and get on to the next job.
We're all facing challenges like that in the workplace with fewer people to do the work. That's a big focus for us right now as a company.
We've been in this space for decades. The electrical industry for us is our main industry. We also serve HVAC, but electrical is really where our bread and butter is. That's going to continue to be our bread and butter going forward.
If I look at our company going forward, our shareholders and our stakeholders need us to grow. We've got to figure out a way to grow. What I've been tasked to do, and what I'm tasking my team with, is that we have to grow at 2X the rate of the market. What do we have to do differently to do that?
Part of it is new product development, which is what I'm talking about. The other part is how do we become internally more efficient at our jobs? We're starting to incorporate AI into a lot of our development, so we can actually produce products and deliver them to the market much faster than we have in the past.
You'll start to see more solutions like that that are based on AI. It’s a learning curve for us, though, because this is something we're asking our entire team to do differently than they have throughout their careers.
That's exciting to me. I've told my team basically, the next 10 years, you're going to see more than you've ever seen in your entire life. Be comfortable being uncomfortable because you're going to have to.
If we want to continue to grow and beat our competition, it's vitally important.
I think for us, it's like we've got to be able to do this just to compete. It's table stakes now to be able to bring new products to the marketplace.
Our brand is really known for reliability and ease of use. But one thing that I want to make sure happens in the future, when we start going to job sites and future conferences, is that people say, “Oh my gosh, they're the most innovative company in the industry, and we can't wait to see what they're going to bring out next.”
I mentioned it earlier: it's around surge products.
It's really helping protect the equipment and the people as well. For us, we're looking at this as a big growth category—not just for the product itself, but also for the markets in which it goes to.
We sell this into not just electrical, but the HVAC market and even into data centers. There’s huge growth in data centers. For us, we want to make sure that we're relevant and that we're a step ahead of our competitors.
We have this surge product portfolio, and we're going to be expanding on this a lot over the next three to five years. We're really excited for the market to be able to see the portfolio of products that we bring forward in the future.
As the electrical industry continues to evolve, manufacturers are balancing the need to innovate with the responsibility of delivering reliable products that tradespeople and contractors trust. For Intermatic, that means staying close to distributors and end users, listening to real-world challenges, and turning that feedback into products that help electricians work more efficiently.
Watch the full interview below to hear more from Kevin Kosobud about Intermatic's product strategy, AI initiatives, and the future of innovation in the electrical industry.