Every great product starts with a problem that drives someone crazy. For Jengyi Deng, it was a small rectangular pool in a backyard in Indiana.
As a Chinese exchange student living with a host family through college in the United States — Jengyi took on her share of the household chores. The pool was hers.
“It was so frustrating to take care of it, because debris just kept coming with all the trees and bushes around it,” she tells me when we sit down at the ECOVACS ROBOTICS headquarters in Suzhou, where The Carousel and our sister site Women Love Tech were among the first Australian journalists invited inside. “Every time I walked into the backyard, I’d see a messy pool, and it just drove me crazy. I had to clean it and maintain it every single day in summer. The funny thing is, I think we spent more time maintaining the pool than actually enjoying it.”
That daily frustration planted a seed. “That’s the first time it came to my mind — it could be better if we had some kind of butler to take care of the pool. To make you feel like you’re living in a luxury hotel, where everything is properly managed and silently taken care of, so you don’t have to pay any attention to it.”
Years later, that butler exists. It’s called the ULTRAMARINE P1, ECOVACS’ robotic pool cleaner, which launched in Australia and New Zealand this month — and Jengyi, now the company’s go-to-market strategy manager and product marketing manager for ULTRAMARINE, helped will it into being.
From pain point to product
Jengyi has spent five years in the robotics industry, and her role at ECOVACS is to bridge the gap between advanced technology and the people who need it. “My role is to bridge our technology and our products to the customers,” she explains, “to make sure we’re solving real customer pain points and communicating the actual value of our product to the people who need it.”
When ECOVACS — which had already moved from robotic vacuums indoors to robotic lawn mowers outdoors — was weighing its next step, Jengyi raised her hand for pool cleaning. “Pool cleaning is, from my perspective, the most time-consuming and knowledge-demanding chore. You have to know about the chemicals, how to use the tools. And it’s the least enjoyable job to do.”
Characteristically, she deflects any suggestion that the ULTRAMARINE was her idea alone. “It was a strategy made by the whole company. I played a really small role. But everybody at ECOVACS is important, because we all play different roles to put the puzzle together — to get a whole picture of what kind of products people are waiting for.”
What she brought to the table, though, was something no market survey could: lived experience. “Thanks to my experience living in the United States, I have actual experience taking care of a pool. That’s maybe my advantage — I can stand with our customers, instead of only with our R&D team, to see what kind of product we, and the customer, actually want.”
She’s a believer in the products she markets, too — she owned ECOVACS robots before she ever joined the company. “The brand image I got from ECOVACS was really clear: they do innovation fast, but they do manufacturing slow — to make sure they own the leading technology to solve the most difficult pain points, but have the most durable and reliable product. That’s a brand I could trust. I could put my money in it, I could give my time to it — and that’s why I chose to join.”
The one thing missing? Her own pool. “Sadly, I don’t own a pool right now,” she laughs. “Hopefully in ten years.”
*The ECOVACS ULTRAMARINE P1 robotic pool cleaner is on sale now for $999 in Australia and NZ$1,299 in New Zealand.
*Robyn Foyster travelled to Suzhou, China as a guest of ECOVACS ROBOTICS