Jeremy Leifker leads the product strategy and marketing group at John Deere, a division responsible for bringing new ideas to the company pipeline. While much of what is in the works remains a secret, Leifker took time at InfoAg to tell AgWired about a theme that is important to what John Deere develops.
Telematics, or remote measurements, are an important part of the future, Leifker says. At John Deere that product is known as JD Link, and it assess what’s happening in the machine at all times. “Right now details really matter, so having confidence in everything you do to the field, how that equates to the bottom line, having that remote measurement is critical to do that, so you get that with JD Link,” he explains.
Of course, data is one thing, making sense of it is another. That’s why John Deere’s Operations Center is such a big deal. The platform is a tool open to many companies– businesses that offer a service to the grower and do it really well. In the Operations Center a grower can input his data and have it sync with any of the many services he chooses. While (of course!) John Deere has great solutions, other products may specialize in measuring profit lose, or helping growers organize the work day. This connectivity is the future of agriculture, Leifker believes.
“Getting that integrated for the farmers is really key, so I’d say that’s another theme around integration, and a lot of that happens on the back side.”
Overall, much of John Deere’s product strategy focuses on shortening the amount of time it takes from discovering a problem to providing users with a solution. Right now the team works with a handful of growers in the U.S. and Canada throughout the entire process of developing a solution, making sure they keep in close touch to address concerns as they happen. John Deere customers can look forward to the results of that teamwork hitting the market in the next two years.
To hear more about the future of product development at John Deere, listen to my full interview here: [wpaudio url=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/zimmcomm/infoag-John_Deere-Leifker-2016.mp3″ text=”Jeremy Leifker, John Deere”]
