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20 minute read
Summary
On this episode of Collaboration Cafe, the Collab Collective’s Craig Durr sits down with Henry Levak, Vice President of Product at Logitech for Business. Recorded at Logitech’s San Jose headquarters, the conversation explores how Logitech takes the long view in product development, balancing today’s customer needs with technology investments designed to deliver value years into the future.
Over iced lattes and a tour of Logitech’s workplace innovation spaces, Henry shares insights into product strategy, AI, workplace technology, and the importance of building flexible solutions that can evolve over time.
Their discussion covers:
- The Long View of Product Development: How Logitech plans hardware, software, and partnerships with future customer needs in mind
- Lessons from the Pandemic: Why video collaboration became business-critical and how supply chain resilience shaped product decisions
- AI and Customer-Centered Innovation: The importance of understanding real-world challenges before developing new technologies and experiences
- Future-Proofing Collaboration Solutions: How products like Rally Bar were designed to support new capabilities and use cases years after launch
- The Connected Workplace: Logitech’s growing ecosystem of workplace software, wayfinding, occupancy insights, and environmental sensing solutions
- Flexible Spaces and Simpler Experiences: How products like Rally Board 65, Sight, Rally AI Camera Pro, and Spot help organizations create adaptable, easy-to-manage collaboration environments
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Transcript
Craig Durr: Everyone, this is Craig Durr with the Collab Collective. I want to welcome you to another edition of the Collaboration Cafe. Now, this one comes to you from San Jose, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. But this doesn't look like Silicon Valley around me, so bear with me, because I want to make a point here.
I've been thinking a lot lately about our industry and how we think about time. We think about things in terms of quarters, right? We think about products shipped last quarter, products launched last quarter. Did we make our numbers last quarter? That's all very important, and it bears weight. But sometimes you need to sit back and play a different game.
And I found someone who I think does that really well. The fact is, he actually has to make decisions that go beyond a quarter into 1, 2, 3, 5-7 years. And I think it's really interesting, because I want to introduce you to someone who I think has great insights into the long view.
Today, I'm going to introduce you to Henry Levak. He runs the product team at Logitech for Business. You know what, I think he might be one of these people that has mastered this idea of the long view. We're going to sit down and talk to him. I want to find out what actually is the long view in his mind. How do you plan for it, and what does it look like in practice? So, come with me and meet Henry Levak.
Henry, good to see you, man.
Henry Levak: Welcome to San Jose. Good to see you.
Craig Durr: How are you doing? I appreciate you having me. So San Jose, I'm gonna get to see the heart and depth of Silicon Valley here. I love it.
Let's do this. Some of our audience may not know who you are, so I want to make sure everyone understands who Henry Levick is. So right now you are the VP of product for Team Workspaces at Logitech, right? And that's part of the larger Logitech for Business.
Henry Levak: Definitely
Craig Durr: How does that organization work there?
Henry Levak: Most people have heard of Logitech, probably bought something from us over the years. We're kind of divided into multiple different areas of focus. We have our gaming team, so we have a huge gaming focus. We do really well there. We have a personal workspace solution, which is what a lot of people know us for—the mice, keyboard, webcams, stuff like that.
And then I have the fortunate job of representing the TWS, or the Team Workspace Solution. So this is all the video conferencing equipment that we enable for wherever people want to video-enable spaces.
Craig Durr: I love it, and I'm excited about this one because I was talking to the audience that I want to kind of get into the mind, the heart, the soul… the soul of Henry Levak. I want to understand what makes you tick because one of your biggest challenges probably is not thinking about this quarter or next quarter, but you have to think a couple years out on what you're planning in your roadmap.
Henry Levak: I think that's probably one of the challenging parts, but also the fun part of our job. I would say a lot of our customers, our partners, they look for partnerships, and partnerships tend to be longer term, and they expect us to make the right decisions, both technically and commercially for the long term. So, yes, that is certainly something that the team and I think a lot about.
Craig Durr: You're right, you've got a really great team that's working with you.
Henry Levak: Probably the best part of my job is the people I work with. That is the design, the engineering teams, the business folks.
Craig Durr: You guys have some really great people that do that.
Henry Levak: Amazing people. And, of course, the product and product marketing teams are exceptional as well.
Craig Durr: Yeah, I bet. Okay, so let's do this. Let's sit down, have a cup of coffee, and let's get to know you a little bit better because I want to figure out what makes you tick. Come on, go get a cup of coffee.
What do you want to get?
Henry Levak: Can you do an ice latte?
Craig Durr: I love it. I haven't had an ice latte in a while. It's perfect for this weather. I might be able to judge mine. Let's do two of those, please.
Cheers to you. This is your drink of choice.
Henry Levak: I drink any coffee, any espresso, but an ice latte on a warm day.
Craig Durr: So, you've been at Logitech for 8-9 years. You were there right before COVID hit, and afterwards. I was also in your shoes, working with product teams at that point in time. That's something you couldn't plan for. Any long view you would have had would have never said, “All of a sudden we're going to be in this lockdown period, everyone's going to have this high dependency on on video.”
Henry Levak: I mean, we thought video was important before the pandemic, but during the pandemic, I think it certainly elevated the conversation to a different level. It kind of went from being a nice-to-have to being a utility, and everyone's expectations thereafter became at such a high level, both in terms of video quality and being able to do it, but also supply and having access to these components. So when you think about the long view to us, that is features, that is partnerships, that is products, it is also supply chain and being the trusted, the resilient partner so that when things go up and things go down, people can trust us. That's why we think about it very broadly.
Craig Durr: I'm sure you do, man.
Henry Levak: It was crazy, and you could see it from device sales. Looking back, at one point, I made a joke that was like the BRIO webcam was worth more than toilet paper, if you remember those days, because you couldn't get them, and it just spoke to the importance of having these products for business continuity, people to be able to connect, even on a personal level, and of course, there were other health and medical use cases that were super important to us to support.
But the team leaned in, and we did a relatively good job to make sure… just an interesting data point. We were working on so many projects when COVID hit, many of them just got completely paused, and the entire engineering team went into kind of multisourcing componentry, so as soon as we'd find out that one component became unavailable or limited supply, they would start immediately working on multiple different components to make it supply. So, overall we had a pretty good outcome, relatively speaking, in terms of supply capabilities during the pandemic, but that was because of our just direct focus on making sure that that element was being resolved.
Craig Durr: So tell me right now, what's inspiring you? What are you reading these days? What are you watching on TV?
Henry Levak: I watch a little bit less TV than I wish I could.
Craig Durr: Okay, I'm sure. Yeah, that's why Netflix helps us. You can do it on demand.
Henry Levak: Absolutely, with the kids in the sports most of the time, it's either that or Logitech.
Craig Durr: Are you running around doing all the soccer and everything else?
Henry Levak: We are a softball, soccer, baseball, and basketball family. So that is most of my weekends. That's what you would find me doing. And if it's a softball game, you probably see me with the Mevo cameras recording it.
Craig Durr: Oh, really?
Henry Levak: Yes, I'm that guy doing that extra camera, so I'm doing video on and off work.
Craig Durr: What are you reading these days? Are you reading?
Henry Levak: I'm reading everything and everyone. What I really like about some of the things, there's the normal publications, the New York Times, and all these guys, but yeah, just reading directly from the people that are building AI capabilities in the future.
Craig Durr: I mean, that is such a hot topic right now, right?
Henry Levak: To me personally, it's probably one of the more exciting technologies. So, I'm an optimist. I really do believe technology is going to solve so many of the pain points and add so much more to life. I know there's a lot of questions around what the future holds with AI, and I don't believe I have the answer. But historically, technology has generally improved people's quality of life, and I think AI tools will certainly do that. So I'm pretty optimistic. I like to read directly from people that are working on these things, and how they think about that.
Craig Durr: Yeah, do you have anyone you recommend?
Henry Levak: I mean, anyone basically who works at SpaceX, anyone that works on OpenAI, the Claude team.
Craig Durr: Have you heard of someone named Ben Evans? He used to be with a16z. He's got a great newsletter and podcast. Good pulse of what's taking place here in your neck of the woods here.
Henry Levak: Yes, absolutely. There's just lots of sources, and I would say some of them are probably less known because they're maybe the engineer or the researcher behind it.
I think it's interesting just to understand the details that go behind this technology. It's a little… it's way different than what we've historically been used to. You know, the power consumption, the social impact. It's fascinating to see how people think about it.
Craig Durr: Yeah, there's another woman out there that, if you haven't heard about, I encourage you to. Her name is Amy Webb, and she positions herself as a futurist, and I always have a hard time when people talk about that, but she stitches together these technology forecasts in these industries. And now she's looking at them, how they triangulate and impact each other, and she's able to draw this web that brings them all together. It's funny, it's her last name there.
Henry Levak: And I think part of what we have to do, generally, as an industry and as technologists, is we have to do a balancing of what is possible and what should happen, and when should it happen. I think, as technologists, we do need to decide what makes sense and what doesn't, and make the right choices on behalf of the consumers, the long-term consumers.
Craig Durr: You know, there was a great line an engineer said to me once, and I think this is a good situation: don't tell me the solution you want, tell me the problem you're trying to solve.
Henry Levak: Absolutely
Craig Durr: Is that a lens you have to take when you're talking to customers?
Henry Levak: Yes, I think a lot of people tend to look at the world with a foundation of what is possible today, and maybe some small incremental step beyond that. But I think part of our job is to think about what is maybe not obvious, and so to do that, what you really want to do is understand the root pain point.
Craig Durr: Yeah
Henry Levak: On the flip side, it's not only important to build these things, but after you build it, you have to sell it, you have to be able to commercialize this thing, otherwise what was the point? So being able to communicate the value of something tends to be better done through understanding the pain points. Part of it is it helps build it, part of it helps tell the story after it's built. Historically, I have found in my career that building things is not the hard part, it's usually being able to tell the right message to the right audience, that usually is the harder part.
Craig Durr: Because it could be an echo chamber. You could be talking, you know, when you have engineers building for engineers, they might have a lot of bells and whistles, but it may not solve the problems.
Henry Levak: Absolutely, and what's really great, even our engineers, they also like to go directly on-site for themselves. We try to create a very close to the source kind of distance, so people working on the problems, the customers themselves, any issues or feature requests, getting the design team, the engineering team, the product… everyone involved to hear it directly from the source. And again, the most important part, in some ways, is once it's built to confirm that that is the expected outcome or the problem has been solved. So it's kind of a two-way thing, it's the intake and it's the outtake at the second half that's just as important. Most people usually focus just on the first part, but I think the second part is just as important.
Craig Durr: What has you thinking beyond a two year horizon? What has you thinking into a three, fou- year, five-year horizon?
Henry Levak: Look, I think our customers, our partners, expect us to think about that stuff for them in the long run. So, there's an expectation that we're always a couple steps ahead of where most people's attention is.
Craig Durr: What's that great Wayne Gretzky line? Don't skate to where the puck is. Skate to where the puck's going.
Henry Levak: Absolutely. And part of that is also to identify which pucks to follow, which ones that's great. You might see three pucks, and only one of those is the one you want to place a bet on. So, part of it is us placing the right bets on the right things in the long run. There's this expectation. I would say that's the fun part of the job. It's the hard part of the job, but there's this expectation. So, from a hardware perspective, we try to future proof the products. We try to say, “Hey, this product needs to continue to deliver for x amount of years and create this really fun playground sandbox for us to evolve it with software.” And then, in parallel, we have to think about what are the software elements that need to come together to make it work.
So, Rally Bar is something that we started right after I joined Logitech. But before we even got to the Rally Bar, we were kind of thinking about a better experience, and we thought about lots of different options and ideas, and the idea we came up with was multiple cameras working together. We looked at center of table wall mounted and all the stuff, and we really wanted to deliver that center of table, that front of the room with multiple center of table cameras. This is back in like 2018, 2019. This is way back then when you looked at that kind of final outcome, and you said, "Okay, let's break this down into pieces. The first, probably most important thing, is there's a video bar, and the video bar is really smart and can do all this multi-camera switching.” So we realized we have to build Rally Bar first.
But as we were building Rally Bar, it was already being built in a way that would allow these center of table cameras. We were already thinking about those use cases. Even the number of USB ports we have on Rally Bar coincided with you needing one site, you needed a scribe camera, and you needed a tap USB, and so you needed three USB ports. So we were putting in the hooks that compute the thermal considerations into the Rally Bar years before anyone even heard of the site. But that was already something that we planned for. And so from our customers, from our partners' perspective, they expect us when they invest into a Logitech video device, and they know that new, interesting, exciting things are coming in the future. They want to know that those products are going to be future-proofed.
Craig Durr: Yeah, that's a key idea. Actually, I was fortunate to host a panel at InfoComm a couple years ago, and the topic was multi camera. And I had someone from your team, we just retired, Alan was out there on that, so at that point in time we were honing in on that language inside out, for this multi camera experience, but he was already leaning into me, hinting and saying, “Look, we see those other use cases outside in, and at that point in time there was nothing public, nothing roadmap-wise, but you guys were already thinking about both use cases. You weren't so stubborn to say just one use case was the right use case.
Henry Levak: Flexibility is kind of the name of the game. There's not any one path that's going to work for everybody. Even our controller options, we have an IP controller and we have a point to point controller. And like to say everyone picks both, one has 80% of the other, and 20% in every organization is a little different, and so cameras will be no different, and so you have to provide flexibility, but you do have to prioritize which one goes first.
Craig Durr: Why don't we do this? Let's wrap up these coffees. We'll go over to your office, and maybe I might convince you to show me what this longer view looks like in practice.
Henry Levak: Awesome, let's do it.
Craig Durr: This is a great example of what we were talking before about thinking of beyond the immediate roadmap, the time frame. This is really a software investment that you guys made as a company that's pretty strategic, right? Tell me about this.
Henry Levak: It really originated from just the many discussions we had with our customers around what are their pain points, and not all the pain points are about a video bar, or it's really about how they work, and being able to decide and help employees decide when to come to the office, where to sit, who to sit next to, and if you really look at the pain points, it comes down to things like wayfinding and space reservations, and having the insights into knowing how those spaces are actually being utilized.
So yes, we've invested a lot into partnerships, but also our own homegrown software that allows us to do things like this, which is that wayfinding experience. This is exactly where we're at now, and even from an orientation perspective, it's pointing into the right direction, which is right here, pointing upwards. Rght behind us is where we're going to go, we're going to visit Western Juniper here, and also it has real-time status of if the room is being used or not, both at the desktop, but also in the conference room itself. So it's easy to orient yourself, it's easy to know where to go if you need to have that meeting room right now.
Craig Durr: How far in advance would you have been thinking about this? This is not a video algorithm, this is not an audio algorithm, this is out of the box.
Henry Levak: It required multiple years of planning because it requires sensors and rooms, sensors of desktops. It requires cloud connectivity that allows it all to kind of connect.
But ultimately, this is a byproduct of a broader collaboration suite, and that all needs to tie together. And, as I said earlier, most of the problems are software problems. It's really, how do you use the hardware that you already have in the room to solve those pain points?
Obviously this is Rally Board 65, the biggest product we've ever made physically. It is big. It's a 65-inch ULM one display, but the thinking that went behind this was again multiple years in advance, thinking about how people actually use these devices now. When you think about an all-in-one touch experience, you certainly think about an open space like this, where people get up, and then they collaborate, and that's a super important use case for us. But the other use case that we've thought a lot about was simplifying standard room deployments.
So how do you use a device like this more optimized for a traditional conference room? But the problem we run into with these sorts of devices is when you make them, pretty much everyone always puts the camera at the top of the display, which makes sense because if you're using it for whiteboarding, you want to walk up to the room, you don't want the camera below, right? But if you put a device like this into a traditional conference room, you actually do want the camera below the display. So, what we were able to do is engineer it in a way that allows people to dynamically adjust the orientation
Craig Durr: We talked about, depending on which space you use it in, the flip. So this type of scenario, exactly where we are sitting down…
Henry Levak: Yeah, and you want that eye level camera experience.
Craig Durr: This is a great experience here, too. This is getting back to—we joked about first principles. What are people trying to do? They just want to be seen at eye level, but I think you had another great insight you shared with me too about this. This wasn't even just an end user value, it was an IT value, too, right?
Henry Levak: Let me show you the perfect example of that, which is in Coastal Redwood. The camera can be mounted above or below the display, so in this case we have a traditional VESA mount. We just simply put the device on that VESA mount, we put the camera below the display. It's a medium-sized room, you have speakers, camera computes built in. But I'm sitting here and I don't want to get up and deal with the UI each time. Of course, we have a controller connected and paired. You can still use the touch display if you want, so depending on the kind of scenario, but for all intents and purposes, this is kind of like what you would deliver with a video bar, but less parts, less vendors, simpler installation.
Craig Durr: So what you've got here is the use case that a lot of people talk about, which is a multi-purpose room in a lot of ways, right? The furniture moves almost as much as the people in the room, sometimes.
Henry Levak: Exactly. I think you referred to kind of more of an activity-based room. So, how do you make that really, really simple? And when we started on this particular room, our integrator said immediately, "Okay, what external audio do we want to do? What DSP do you want to use? And for us, we said, "Let's keep things simple, like why do we have to go straight to DSP?”
So we decided to use our own audio. The way we did that is we simply have a Rally Bar there, and we used our Pendant Mics to install those mic pods off the ceilings, just to get things off the table. And basically now we don't have a DSP in this room, it's a modular space, there's nothing to tune, it's super simple to deploy. Our own IT team pretty much configured it, and we're pretty much done.
The second thing that we learned about ourselves is we kind of assumed that there's gonna be more of a training kind of setup, which is kind of how you see this classroom style set up. What we found is actually post-COVID, we really love the idea of on-sites, so it's less actually about being in a classroom-like setting. It's more about creating those U-shaped tables. People like to go on-site, work together for a week. And usually, in those sorts of situations, some more of a collaborative experience, the tables kind of open up into more of a right traditional kind of conference room shape. And because the tables keep adjusting, having the mic pods in the ceiling installed is a really nice, elegant way to do it, low cost, really low effort. And, of course, with the controller, we wall-mounted a tap IP just to get things off the table, but there's a really simple way to connect a second controller that you could put on the table in case you want to make something within arm's reach.
Craig Durr: So, again, this is your equipment, adjusting for the different use cases in a way that actually is still almost purpose built.
Henry Levak: This is the room that usually gets most people to kind of scratch their heads because whenever they think of boardrooms and they think of their CEOs, they immediately go to very large, costly systems. We wanted to keep things simple. We wanted to make something that's completely self-service. We wanted any of our executives to be able to walk in and just use the room without requiring any IT support.
Craig Durr: Okay
Henry Levak: So we did exactly that. We really don't have any external DSPs or any special camera switching. Everything's automated, like you said, we have a Rally Bar in the front with 2 85-inch displays, and then we just paired it up with two Sights, and those Sights provide that front and center video experience, and also a better audio experience. So, those are microphones and cameras.
Craig Durr: You guys were, I think, first in the market to have actually the center of table cameras paired in a daisy change model going out too.
Henry Levak: First, and also combining it with the front-of-room device that's certified.
Craig Durr: Was that enough for you to think about when you're first building that product out to begin with? You have to think about PoE, you have to think about connectivity, things like that?
Henry Levak: You have to think about even the compute requirements for a device like this, if you think about it, there's two cameras in this device, two cameras there, so that's four cameras. This device has four cameras. So you're designing a system that supports essentially six simultaneous camera streams. It's an entire system, and so just taxing one compute with all that streaming is difficult.
You want to do a distributed compute model, which is essentially what we did. You want to make sure that the microphone systems work, so that you can use the mics built in the bar or the devices, you want to make sure that when you update one thing, all that gets updated, as opposed to just one individual component. So the whole system has to be considered, both from compute thermal to installation to the audio performance, it all has to come together kind of like a jigsaw puzzle. To do that, you can't build it all at once. You have to build it in parts, and to do that, you have to really think about what the final state is, and then work backwards with a plan.
Craig Durr: This is like a chess game. You are doing the Queen's Gambit here from move one. Is that what you're kind of trying to do here?
Henry Levak: In the boardroom, you saw the inside out, and here we do a lot of the outside in testing, which you can see.
Craig Durr: We got four cameras, if you count the board, five cameras. Wow.
Henry Levak: Of course, you've heard of Rally AI Camera Pro.
Craig Durr: I love this one. I actually had a chance to help you guys out with an ebook on this, but at the same time, seeing it live at ISE, and everyone's response to that was fantastic.
Henry Levak: Really nice, right?
Craig Durr: It was.
Henry Levak: Yeah, people were very excited about the tech, but equally they were maybe even more excited about the installation experience,
Craig Durr: You guys did some really great stuff around that, right?
Henry Levak: Yeah, as you know, we've been thinking a lot about how we make this technology. If you look around this room, it's very technically correct. You have cameras everywhere, but how do we make these cameras disappear? One of the challenges we throw out our design team as part of designing the new AI cameras is how do you hide technology? How do you make technology to be more polite out of the way?
You'll see in-wall-mounted solutions we have for both the Rally AI Camera and AI Camera Pro. Historically, those have existed, but those have never really been purposefully designed for any particular solutions. So, with the new mounting solutions, it looks super clean. It's completely decluttered.
Craig Durr: And you have these mounting options that hide discreetly behind a wall that has that same type of softscape feature as your Bars do.
Henry Levak: We don't really want technology to celebrate itself. That's why our tap controller is so low profile because we don't want you to walk into the room and the first thing you see is the technology right front and center. We purposely designed solutions where the cables are hidden, or the controllers are low profile, or now things are built into the walls just to kind of hide the technology.
This is you thinking beyond video bars, and that is Spot. It is a really easy to deploy environmental and presence sensor. It literally takes seconds to deploy. It's kind of like a sticker, you just put the wall mount in. I know this is on glass, you just kind of mount it in. That's pretty much it. So it detects air quality, temperature, and CO² particulate matter. It also detects presence, so if someone's in the space or not…
Craig Durr: So this is a great space to think about that because I may not be plugged into a monitor. I mean, I'm sitting here on my laptop working, but what drove that? Who is asking for knowing if a pod was used or something like this?
Henry Levak: The conversation started years ago when customers or partners were asking us for occupancy insights for their spaces, but they didn't say, “I would occupy insights just for the rooms with video bars.” They said they wanted it pretty much for everything, right? But in certain rooms you're just not going to put a Rally Bar. We could try to put one in here, but it might not fit. So in some areas they just don't want technology. This is a place where you put on your laptop and just walk away, right?
Craig Durr: But I think there's actually an expansion of your ecosystem that other people weren't thinking all the way into, right? I mean, people were thinking about panels and touch controls and door displays, right now. But to be thinking about this in those sensors, because this aligns to sensors that are also, for example, in the 65 board, right? So I can have the board deployed where I might have these environmental centers. Now I have this as well.
Henry Levak: So all the auto space management stuff I showed you earlier, we're looking at the wayfinding. You want to know if this space is available or not in real time. You want to walk up to a big map and see, is it green or red, and if it's, if it's available, you want to be able to use it. So this ties in nicely to the broader ecosystem. So, again, think of it as kind of like little puzzle pieces, where there's an insights element, there's an automation element, but in order to enable all that, which you really need, are sensors in all these different areas that inform the software back end.
The feedback has been consistent for a long time, and we took action on it years ago, and you're starting to see parts of it come to life, both in the board and this, and you'll see it certainly in future products.
Craig Durr: All right, I like this. Well, let me take you on one field trip. I want to show you what inspired me for this long view idea.
Henry Levak: Let's do it.
Craig Durr: Okay, let's go. Come on, last spot.
All right, Henry, this is the long view, right? This is what we're working towards.
Henry Levak: Not exactly, but this works.
Craig Durr: Okay, I like it. Well, Henry, thank you for your time. I really appreciate it. We had a chance to learn more about you, about how you think, about how you bring these, these products and these visions to life, beyond the quarters into that next timeframe, so I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for coming out. I'm still gonna enjoy the view, though.
Henry Levak: It's beautiful.
Craig Durr: It is.