Zero isn't nothing

We begin at the end the trail of missed opportunities

Over the past few months, I've been steadily improving my cardio fitness, and with these newly installed Precor machines, I thought I had made significant progress. I was sweating profusely, barely adhering to the gym's machine cleaning policy, yet my average heart rate was showing as 77 bpm, a huge difference from my usual ~150 bpm. Had I been an amazingly gifted athlete, and just needed the right training to unlock my true potential?!

It turns out, when my hands got sweaty, it interfered with the HR monitor sensors, causing them to occasionally lose the signal. Instead of treating this data loss as a NULL value and excluding it from performance calculations, the system logged it as a ZERO, significantly skewing the health data. It's surprising that the Precor Product Team invested so much in building new machines with advanced hardware but seemingly didn't thoroughly test them with actual users or customers.

Curiosity piqued, I visited the Precor website and found they heavily promoted a feature called PrecorCast?, even trademarking it. However, in all my time spent in the cardio section, I have never seen anyone actually use this feature.

This disappointing situation reminds me of the gap between hardware and software quality in the auto industry, albeit Precor operates within more manageable parameters they have greater control over. Working on human health is a remarkable endeavor, and I wish the leadership team at Precor recognized the positive impact they could have and stop getting distracted by pet projects like PrecorCast?. They have the focused attention of countless individuals striving to improve themselves, and yet Precor stands there with their hands stuffed in their pockets.

Products shape our world, and in turn, they reflect it back to us. We Product People have to do better so we all can BE better.