Q: What is your new position, and what does it entail?
A: I’ve assumed the role of CTO (Chief Technical Officer). This position is defined in a variety of ways across industries and organizations. At Mackie, this is a new role and my charge here is to develop a technology roadmap, to help the teams interpret that roadmap in ways to drive innovative and exciting products for our customers, and in the process, to work across the product development teams to assess, specify and deploy design platforms which will allow us to get to market faster and more efficiently.
Q: How has your background prepared you for your new role?
A: It’s the experience I have had over the past 40 years that enables me to fit into a position such as this. From using and selling audio equipment in a professional environment to designing successful products and managing teams of R&D in past roles, along with the passion I have for technology, it has always made shaping of future needs feel natural. For the past 12 months (during our lockdown in Australia), I spent a significant amount of time with content-creation hardware and software. The shift in consumer demands in both the pro audio and prosumer markets meant technologies that very few users were previously concerned about were front and center. Understanding these and future technologies in this space was a very important part of my role.
Q: What new marketing initiatives are we likely to see from the company?
A: I can’t be specific here for obvious reasons, but what I can say is that you will see some great new products from Mackie later in this year and next, spanning from the creator space to the professional space.
So many new technologies are becoming available in this space, while at the same time the power of processing continues to increase; the intelligence that can be added to new products is a very exciting aspect to me.
Q: What are your short- and long-term goals?
A: Within Mackie, the short-term goals are to implement advanced new technologies as fast as we can in new products, so that users can get the most benefit from them.
From a personal point of view, and as a long-term goal, I just love to see the gear we create here in users’ hands as they smile and comment how much they love using the products that we spent the time and effort to create so they could enjoy the result. Bringing the technologies to the table to achieve these results is the short and long-term goal.
Q: What is the greatest challenge that you face?
A: Time to learn more is one of the main challenges I can think of. We never stop to learn and I am very motivated to enhance my knowledge constantly. Keeping up with the ever-growing shift in the way products are used and creating workflows that both enhance and simplify are always a challenge and a balance that’s not easy to achieve. It often means you need to let go and remove yourself from the normal ways you’ve been controlling or using a specific project, and try to view it from a different perspective.