Introducing
Proxxi
Who – Work – Challenges – Outcome
Increasing Industrial Workers’ Safety Through Innovative Products
Proxxi specializes in wearable workplace safety technology. Its first product, Proxxi Voltage, aims to make the world safer by preventing industrial electric injuries. Its innovative voltage sensing wristband has been featured in Forbes, The Washington Post, Smithsonian, and TechCrunch.
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Proxxi had a new product concept – Proxxi Contact, an automated contact tracing technology that also provides real time alerts for social distancing. Proxxi Contact delivers exposure reports and is able to mitigate business disruptions by breaking the train of transmission at the source.
Solutions Integration
Due to the demanding and immediate nature of COVID-19, Proxxi’s aim was to take Proxxi Contact from engineering ideation to customer release in five months. Alteria’s principal, Evan Willms, took charge of the product roadmap and development backlog for this new product, integrating disparate customer-acceptance criteria and evolving engineering-feasibility information into an actionable plan.
The key step in the aggressive launch timeline was determining how existing technical assets, such as Proxxi’s data ingestion and processing platform, could be repurposed to play a role in the new product solution. This minimized the amount for new technical development required, allowing the project to meet Proxxi’s fierce schedule.
A director of health and safety at a Fortune 50 company was excited about Proxxi’s electrical-safety solution, but the firm was unable to move forward with purchasing owing to the information-security requirements imposed on vendors by the client’s IT-procurement process. Evan Willms was engaged by Proxxi to identify and meet the information-security requirements and unblock the deal. While procurement staff had been encouraging Proxxi to “just get SOC2 certified,” obtaining that certification would not only require significant time and expense but also be unnecessary in the first place.
Breaking down the requirements and understanding the intentions behind the procurement-validation checklist resulted in a set of SOC2-aligned information-security policies and an ASVS L1 pentest that met all of the checklist’s criteria. Moreover, they enabled the purchase order to close several months ahead of initial projections.
Success and Beyond 🚀
Proxxi needed additional technical leadership, because its historically collaborative workflow was strained by the demands of the short timeline for delivery-to-market demands. Evan Willms stepped in as a temporary engineering manager, taking direct management of 13 technical staff across firmware, software, and manufacturing-hardware domains to free the chief engineer from administrative burdens.
With a clear roadmap and the management support to proactively identify and remove project barriers, the technical team met the project’s aggressive timelines for product readiness. In the final phase, potential leaders were identified and provided with leadership training to create three self-sufficient engineering specialty teams.
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