Q&A Blog Interview: David Bischof, Chief Product Officer
Tell us about your background and your journey at Premise.
I’m a Cleveland, Ohio-born tech lover who’s been working with technology for over two decades. I have moved around quite a bit in the last 10 years including stints in Columbus, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. I was lucky enough to meet my wife, who is Turkish, of 14 years while in Abu Dhabi and my son was born in Dubai in 2012.
I joined Premise in December 2017 after learning about what the company does and its underlying technology- I was completely enamored. When I started at Premise, I was a team of one working to help the company scale and deliver value to its customers in a team I coined in my previous work at Accela, Solutions Engineering. It’s not a commonly named team but I have found it’s invaluable to many companies and especially startups. My team grew over time and as the company shifted, my role shifted, and eventually I took on all global operations, customer success, data science, engineering, product, and design. At one point I had both the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technology Officer roles, and most recently I’ve moved into the Chief Product Officer role to focus on making the Premise product best in class.
What are the key market trends driving the evolution of our industry, and how are we adapting our products to meet these trends?
We understand the importance of market share and share of shelf for our CPG customers and how difficult it is to both get and understand that data from traditional trade stores. Traditional trade, think mom and pop stores and not modern trade big box stores, can account for up to 70% of market share in some countries. However, obtaining data from these stores is incredibly difficult. We are making it easy and fast. The next challenge though is making sense of the tens of thousands of stores and hundreds of thousands of data points to sift through. This is the next frontier Premise will be focusing on, how to use our in-store execution intelligence data to quickly identify opportunities for our customers. To do that, we are working on the next evolution of analytics tools to solve this issue.
How do we prioritize feature development based on customer needs and market demand?
As a startup, we like to move fast and experiment. We will typically build wireframes and prototypes to help ideate through concepts. Priorities of these innovations come from as many direct interactions with our customers as possible. It is incredibly important to meet directly with the users of our software who are utilizing our data and analytics to solve day-to-day problems. By talking with regular consumers, we are able to really understand the biggest driving factors to help make better and faster decisions.
What do you believe sets Premise apart from others in the space?
Our ability to collect and analyze data from emerging markets as well as mature markets really sets us apart from everyone else. We believe we have the world’s most comprehensive data for traditional trade in the countries we operate in and our data quality is second to none. For instance, in the Execution Intelligence portfolio, our Rolling Retail Census solution provides full visibility into the nuances of product distribution, execution, and competitor strategies at the POS level, while our Trackers solution delivers same-day data on product distribution that enables CPG brands to maintain optimal product availability while swiftly addressing any supply chain disruptions.
Can you discuss any recent product launches or updates and their impact on our business and customers?
We have a lot in motion at Premise. We are currently working on a new visualization tool that will allow our customers to view, geospatially, all of the traditional trade stores and their complete data profiles anywhere Premise collects data. This will enable our customers to both easily and quickly find the solutions to their most time-consuming and cumbersome challenges. Having a completely automated and intelligent system that will allow for fast querying and deep dive levels of data will undoubtedly make our customer’s lives much easier.