Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1189040
38 SMT007 MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2019 ment in the overall efficiency. We want to make every part of the process as efficient and nice for everybody who touches it as possible. We want designers to love designing. And in production, we want designers and production engineers to have a good time in that hand- off and to have a great relationship with each other. We believe the software and platform can go a long way to doing that. We think that we can automate more and solve more prob- lems there as we discover what they are. Every time an engineer or a PCB designer generates outputs and sends them to fabrication, there are question marks, which generate anxiety. We believe we can hammer those question marks into exclamation points. Johnson: We talked briefly about what's inside the CAD silo for the designer. That is the space designers say they want to stay in, but they have to do all of this other necessary stuff. Part of your mission is to make the overall user experience for your customers when they're outside the silo as easy, effective, error-free, and efficient as possible so that they can spend more time in the silo. Jordan: Right. Swim in your lane, and you can go as fast as you want to go. That's a good way of putting it. Allow people to do what they love, love what they do, keep doing it, get faster over time, and do what they do best. Design the products for the manufacturers to build them, and make sure that they have all the data they need and not one byte more or less. Johnson: Pivots are risky. Are you staying true to your core, or does this change Altium's core? Jordan: We will never lose our focus as a com- pany either on our primary users, which are electrical engineers and PCB design special- ists. As we showed today, we're committed to making the design side of it better and better, as well as solving these other problems with CAD. All of this comes down to this one thing that Lawrence mentioned, too; we want to focus on user experience. That would be the one thing we want to make sure we're saying here at AltiumLive. Johnson: You have redefined what user expe- rience means in our industry. We usually talk about, "That's the fit and finish, and the look and feel, of the application structure." That's not it for you anymore; you've broadened it. Jordan: It's much bigger; it's going from an idea to a factory-producible and economically producible product that people want to buy and use. Johnson: Excellent. Thanks, Ben. Jordan: Thank you, Nolan. SMT007 Amelia sums up the learning process with, "We've gone through different stages of business growth. In the first five years, we worked our tails off to keep our customers happy and deliver the best that we could. Over the next five years, we created manufacturing cells and innovated. The next five years are going to be about finding new markets for the prod- ucts that we make, increasing our through- put, and innovating into some other carbon or fiberglass opportunities." Click here to read the entire interview. I-Connect007's Barry Matties recently visited Goodwinds Composites, a company that he's watched grow from a small distributor serving the hobby industry to a full-fledged manufacturer serving many industries. Leland Holeman started this business as his first career job right out of college. Amelia Cook, his sister, joined a short time after, and the two of them have worked together since to transform this company into a healthy business. During the conversation, they shared their story along with some of the lessons they have learned. Breaking the Stereotype: Millennials in Manufacturing