FoA 245: Agtech Product Strategy with Climate Corp Chief Product Officer Ranjeeta Singh

Future of Agriculture

Today’s show connects back to episode 241 with Craig Rupp of Sabanto, where we talked about, among many other things, how the Climate Corp has been able to become a central data collection platform on so many large scale farms. Ranjeeta Singh, the Chief Product Officer of The Climate Corp joins us to further explore data ownership, product strategy and design thinking. Ranjeeta was hired last year to drive the product strategy and roadmap for Climate’s digital farming solutions. She has more than two decades of background in hardware and software at the intersection of IoT, AI and data science with companies like Intel and Teradata. She holds five patents at Intel, and multiple publications. She is also the recipient of the “Top 50 under 50 most powerful women in technology”. Her perspective as someone coming from a career in tech to now a career in agtech is something I found interesting and insightful.

“People only think of Climate as a Fieldview platform...I have talked about the three lines of business. We talk about software as a service which is a Fieldview platform, data as a service which is the actual platform and how you organize and store data...and then we have professional services where you’re more focused on tailored solutions.” - Ranjeeta Singh

Ranjeeta highlights design thinking principles in developing new products whereby you focus on customer pain points and design solutions with a go-to market approach.

“Product really helps you define the business case and the requirements so it helps define why you’re doing something before you get into the what and the how.” Data as a service is a hot topic now among producers including what happens after the data is collected and analyzed. “The concern has always been about what constitutes proper notice to the consumers that the data is being collected and the privacy of that data….the producers are understandably worried about the information getting in the hands of the wrong people.”

“Our view has always been that the data collected to the digital farming tools belongs to the farmers....You can anonymize the data and you can leverage the insights based on it but do not share the data without the consent of the farmers.” - Ranjeeta Singh

Insights from this data analysis can for example establish calculated recommendations as to what inputs, at what rate and in which location can be most beneficial to their operations. “We are giving value to them through professional services.” The current focus of her team is evolving the software to best address the needs of producers and creating pilot programs to optimize the benefit to individual operations and their exposure to these new technologies.

“I think we need to build out this ecosystem of players and ecosystem of products and technology, but people should be able to choose what they want to.” - Ranjeeta Singh

Ranjeeta believes that by making a compelling product producers will be able to accomplish multiple goals within one system. If a company is unable to fill a specific void and provide that type of service then producers should have the choice to use and combine different technologies together. While they may be deemed competitors, Ranjeeta supports not locking producers into any one system but rather focusing on making the best product for her customers and allowing them to choose the system that best fits their needs.

This Week on The Future of Agriculture Podcast:

• Meet Ranjeeta Singh, the Chief Product Officer of The Climate Corp
• Explore the intricacies and considerations regarding collecting, analyzing and disseminating producer generated data.
• Learn about the core belief systems and three lines of business Climate Corp is engaged in
• Learn more about Climate Corp at www.climate.com

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