Product strategy · Roadmap · UX · GTM
The operating system for indoor farms
3 min read
Role
Founding PM, Product and Design
Timeline
2022–present
Scope
Product strategy · Roadmap · UX · GTM
Industries
Indoor vertical farming
Outcome
15% faster cycles, 35% less downtime
The system a farm runs on
Digital Cultivation is the operating system an indoor vertical farm runs on: environment monitoring, plant records, daily tasks, energy and harvest planning in one place, granular enough to answer a question about one tray on one level. I joined AGEYE as its first product hire and took it from whiteboard to live deployment in commercial farms, owning the roadmap and drawing every screen.
Analytics cards for energy use, plant development, cycle stress and production totals
The brief
Indoor farming is capital intensive and sells on delivery dates committed weeks ahead. A missed environmental alert is not an inconvenience, it is a crop cycle worth thousands and a short shipment.
Temperature, humidity and plant health sat in disconnected spreadsheets and clipboard logs, so problems surfaced after the plants had already suffered. Supervisors spent more than ten hours a week collating readings by hand. None of it could be handed to a new hire, because the working knowledge lived with the head grower.
Freshness, performance score and tray occupancy panels
Operations dashboard next to a grow rack rendered level by level
The solution
We replaced the spreadsheets, the clipboards and the three other tools with a single platform. Environment, plant development, tasks, energy, inventory and harvest planning sit in one product, and each goes down to the level a grower actually works at: this tray, on this level, in this rack, today.
Everyone on the team reads the same screens. A grower checks a rack, a supervisor checks a cycle and a manager checks the month without exporting a file or asking whoever owns it. The interface runs on management by exception, so only the parameters outside their range surface and one operator can scan thousands of plants in seconds. Having it in one place is what makes it usable by people who did not build it.
Farm energy screens
The process
Building this from nothing meant choosing which parts of a farm to put into software, in what order. I spent the early months in the farm and in interviews with the people running it, mapped the operations a grower repeats every day, and scoped the product around the ones that decide a cycle: environment, plant development, tasks and harvest. Everything else waited its turn.
The grower came before the dashboard in every call. The product went through a tablet demo, then a mobile first version for tasks at the rack, then the web platform where the analytics live, because the person holding a device in front of a rack needs something different from the person reading a season. I ran two week sprints so a small team shipped a working slice each cycle, and we prioritised what a farm needed to run that month over what made the product look finished. Digital Cultivation earns its place by making the daily decision easier and the farm more profitable, not by having more screens.
Isometric floor map open on a laptop inside the real grow room
Faster crop cycles
Less unplanned downtime
Efficiency gain, manual logging retired
The impact
What changed on the floor
Cycles run 15 percent faster and unplanned downtime is down 35 percent, with a further 20 percent efficiency gain from retiring manual logging. The ten hours a week supervisors spent collating readings by hand are gone entirely. New staff are productive in hours rather than weeks, because the procedures live in the product instead of in one person’s memory, and a grower answers a question by opening the platform rather than by finding the person who keeps the file.
For a business that commits to delivery dates weeks ahead, that is the difference between a full shipment and a short one.
