Christopher Benner
Meet Richard Hammerl – Fusion 360 Community Manager – Electronics.
Richard is a mechanical engineer with more than 20 years experience in the electronics sector. As one of the long-time experts for the now standardized PCB design software EAGLE, Richard offered technical support and documentation in direct contact with customers and PCB manufacturers – this made him one of the most well-known faces of the PCB industry in Europe and helped to increase the popularity of EAGLE and make it the most used PCB software worldwide. His experience and expertise has led him to help integrate PCB design into mechanical CAD – which now is Fusion 360 Electronics – providing PCB designers and mechanical engineers with better functionality, less error prone, and shorter lead times – helping his customers to remain competitive in global markets and increasing profit margins for those who create assemblies with integrated electronics.
1. How long have you worked for Autodesk?
I started with Autodesk in July 2016 and came with the acquisition of CadSoft, the company that invented and developed EAGLE, the well-known Electronics CAD tool.
2. How would you describe your role at Autodesk? What does a typical workday look like?
Well, there are no typical workdays at my role. 😉 Every day starts in the morning and my constant companion is electronics. And all work I am involved in is related to it. So my official title is Fusion 360 Community Specialist, Electronics which is an appropriate description, if you see “community” in a wider angle. Let’s start inside Autodesk. We have a lot of colleagues dealing with mechanics. They know all about Fusion; the design workspace, drawings, simulation, rendering, manufacturing, and much more. When it comes to electronics a lot of things sometimes seem not to be clear. The electronics guys think different than mechanical guys do. And so, I help to understand what electronics is about.
I am also working closely with our support guys. We have some dedicated people to support electronics customers. Well, I offered for 20+ years support to EAGLE customers and now I am happy to still help in particularly tricky cases.
Occasionally, together with Tech Sales we do Fusion introductions. When it comes to Fusion Electronics, I jump in.
There are lots of other areas I am happy to be part of. Giving customer feedback and reporting errors or problems to the QA and development teams, for example. Discussing possible features for future releases. Creating content, like YouTube tutorials or quick tips, and hosting webinars…. recently not too many, but I would like to do more again. The recent bigger task was the EAGLE to Fusion migration guide. I am also happy to be part of the Electronics Business Group, this is the place where we decide and prioritize what the next steps for Electronics in Fusion will be. It’s an awesome and passionate team that I have the honor to work with.
There are some other areas I collaborate with. For example localization. I am based in Germany and my native language is German. So when it comes to localization, I am happy to help with translations. I could continue this list with some more…. all in all it is a very diversified work with a lot of fantastic colleagues all over the various orgs in Autodesk and our partners and customers.
3. What do you find interesting about your role? What are the challenges? What do you find satisfying about your work?
Three are so many different areas I am involved in, this is awesome. EAGLE is the foundation of Fusion Electronics, and I know EAGLE for 30 years now. I saw it grow and develop slowly but steadily over the years. And now, since we (EAGLE and I 😊 ) came to Autodesk, things have changed dramatically. An incredible development team made EAGLE not just fly, they gave it a rocket propulsion! I could never have imagined that so many new and ingenious functions could be added in such a short time.
It’s so fantastic to see how Electronics works in Fusion now. We have a tool that helps our customers to do their work. And among other cool features we added functionality that has been asked for since I started my career. And with each release of Fusion we are getting better and we make our customers happy.
4. What drives you to be involved with the Community as much as you are?
I started my career with customer support for a software, I haven’t used once before in my life (don’t ask why… this is a different story). So I took customer calls from day one and they told me what did not work and what would had been their expectations in this situation. Ang guess what? In most cases I agreed and said, yes you are right. Let me check and talk to our dev guys. Then I got an explanation why this feature works like this and not as the customer expected…. well, long story short: in most cases a developer thinks different than a customer does. They have more technical background and see things more logical and think in mathematics. Customers don’t. They want to work with their tools as convenient and efficient as possible. So I am always fighting for the customer, not against them.
With the years support work changed. Internet was new and the first news servers (an early version of our forums today) came up. It is fun to help people to get their job done within a very short time. Emails got more common (no more letters and facsimiles) and you could even send data with your message within minutes. In the mid 1990s there was a real eye-opener for me. I got a phone call from an US company based in California, and they told me that they need an urgent solution for a problem they faced in their layout. So they sent me an message with a link to their server from where I could download the board file and could check it. It was 1AM in California and they (4 people in their office) hoped for a solution before the morning….. instant support!! AWESOME!!
To be honest, I do not remember what the problem was, but I guess we found a solution for them. I see customer support and engagement and building a strong community as a very important pilar for success. Not only for us as a company, but also for our users. I always have been honest with the customers and you have to be reliable. This builds trust and foster advocacy.
A lot of text above…. The very short answer. I love to work with people and want to help them.