Well, It's one thing to be coo, but another to add a valuable function. That is where you have to remove your Engineer Hat and put on the Marketing one. In a normal company the field engineers that are at the customer's site come back and talk to the head of engineering about a problem or feature that needs to be addressed. Then the head engineer has to decide if the feature can be done without changing the cost structure too much. If it's an add-on (option) then he/she needs to get an estimate of cost. Then the sales and marketing guys get involved and they are asked what the market is and the level of resistance on price. ("what can you sell this for?"). If the numbers don't work it gets dropped. Sometimes it works the other way. A sales or marketing person either engages with a customer or they lose a sale to a competitor because theydon't have the option/feature. That causes massive pressure downward to engineering to come up with a solution and at a cost that can compete.
One of the advantages in a company with a flat organization chart like mine (I am Head Engineer, Chief Design Engineer, Director of Production, VP of World Wide Sales, COO, CEO, Chief Technical Writer, and Manager of Customer Support...oh, and I clean up on weekends) is that not a lot of time is wasted on meetings and bickering. The analysis process is shortened. That can lead back to the earlier syndrome of designing a product that has no real demand. I have, over my career fulfilled most of the roles in other companies but typically only one at a time.
I know that often the end user does not understand the technical details of plasma cutting and the parameters that make the difference between a mediocre cut and a good one.
From doing support on plasma cutting for years, I do know that the more information you have, the easier it is to find and fix a problem. Since cut current is "assumed" to be what the dial is set to, things like bad workclamp connections or something wrong in the power section is difficult to diagnose.
I don't want to waste time on advanced features (like variable cut current or automatic current setup) if the end customer sees no value or it just confuses the issue.
TOM Caudle
www.CandCNC.com