Growing up in a construction family at a time when technology was just beginning to take root, it’s little surprise that Brad Barth wound up in a role at a construction industry innovator. Now Chief Product Officer at InEight, Brad came of age at a time when personal computers were beginning to transform everyday life, making previously unimaginable efficiencies possible. Like many in that era, he got bit by the “technology bug” as he saw the many ways technology could automate routine tasks and allow users to gain knowledge through data. This, combined with his passion for construction, led him to a role for which he was an ideal fit.
“Growing up in our house, ENR magazines were all over the place, and I’d just marvel at the pictures of these mammoth projects. I knew I wanted to be involved in the industry,” Brad recalls. Ultimately his focus on project controls became a natural area to explore how to apply a digital approach to what was traditionally a very manual process. “Being able to apply that love of construction and passion for technology, all of that just really comes together at InEight,” Brad says. “That’s what we do — we look at how to apply automation and technology to the problems the construction industry is trying to solve. For me it’s a perfect fit. It allows me to balance two things I’m very passionate about.”
Day-to-day, Brad splits his time between working with product and engineering teams to design solutions that solve industry challenges, and interacting with customers and potential customers to gain an understanding of the issues they face. “That creates a nice loop as we get to collect that feedback from the market, bring it back to our engineering side and continue to innovate based on the feedback we hear,” he says.
One of the most gratifying parts of his job is watching customers take the journey from challenge to solution — seeing the “before and after” snapshot of how businesses are transformed through digital solutions and connected data. He also enjoys hearing how customers who adopt InEight construction software sometimes uncover hidden value in them above and beyond their intended use.
“From time to time you go visit a customer and they’ll show you what they’re doing, and they’re doing something amazing that you hadn’t even thought of,” says Brad. “That’s literally an aha moment — sometimes the jaw just drops. And that’s where you feel like the customer has taken ownership of the solution and is not only getting the intended purpose out of it, but looking for other ways to use it that add value and take it to a whole new level.”
Outside of work, Brad enjoys taking beach vacations with his family and is also a basketball junkie. He still follows the Phoenix Suns dating back to the days when he lived near InEight’s head office in Arizona and would take his son to watch Steve Nash play. Like Nash, Barth played point guard during his playing days. But unlike the Hall of Famer, Brad readily confesses he wasn’t much of a shooter.
“I was a lousy shooter so I focused on running the offense — looking for ways to put my teammates in a position to succeed,” he says. “That teamwork mentality you get from sports translates nicely into the professional world as well.” Today he does exactly that, teaming up with customers to solve their biggest project challenges and providing them with construction technology that is so seamlessly integrated to their business processes that they don’t even need to think about it.
