In The Spotlight - Sawtooth

At Manchester Digital, we like to interview our members to find out a bit more about what they do and their work in the Greater Manchester digital and technology sphere. This week, we're speaking with Brian McEwan, Managing Director at Sawtooth Software. 

What does your organisation do?

It’s often very difficult to get concrete answers from people about how they value features of goods and services (on scale of 1-5, how important is...). We offer a survey platform that goes beyond basic questions with proven methodologies to quantify these preferences. Once the preferences are calculated, they can be used to predict demand for new product and feature development and help estimate price sensitivity and willingness to pay.

We help some of the largest organisations in the world (such as Google, Amazon and P&G), to help optimise their products in an increasingly competitive market.

What do you think is currently the biggest issue facing the digital and tech industry?

How to figure out more sustainable disruption and growth. Many markets continue to see new companies and product offerings with huge venture capital backing that run at a sustained loss in order to fuel huge growth. Targeting growth for the sake of growth and figuring out sustainable revenue later seems very short-sighted. An over-reliance on gig economy workers and volunteer moderation also seem to pose a high risk by transferring risk from the company to an individual.

What is your organisation’s biggest achievement?

Sawtooth Software started asking better survey questions on Apple iie computers, with our first commercial product in DOS. More than 30 years later we’re still the leaders in preference modelling and trade-off analysis.

What would you consider to be your organisation’s biggest challenge?

Surveys have begun to hit a commodity phase where there are large threats by bots and fraud, and it’s a constant arms race by survey panels and software providers to detect and eliminate fraudulent data.

What do you think the future looks like for Manchester’s digital and tech sector?

When we were looking to expand with a physical presence in the UK, we were very impressed by the amount of focus in the north of England regarding technology companies and investment. It was clear Manchester is a hot spot for technology with a lot of excitement and resources.

Tell us something we might not know about your company?

Every pi day (March 14, or 3/14 in the US) we run a survey in our platform with employees to optimize what pies we order to celebrate. The analysis helps us optimize buying a set of pies in order to optimally trade off giving desirable options to as many people as possible without having tons of uneaten pie.

Thank you, Brian!

To find out more about Sawtooth, click here.