Altium - The Google Docs Moment for Hardware

Software got its Google Docs moment years ago, the one where files stopped circulating as email attachments and everyone simply worked in the same place at the same time. Mechanical CAD followed. Electronic design took longer, and this conversation is about what changed when it arrived.

Justin Sears is Head of Product Marketing for SaaS at Altium, and he came to electronics from a decade in big data having never designed a board or written code, which gives him a useful outsider's read on how hardware teams actually work. He joins DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman in person at Glassboard in Indianapolis, after a dinner in Silicon Valley hosted by Duro seated Grant at the end of the table and Justin at the head of it.

Grant describes the change from the inside. Glassboard had hand-built a git repository to version Altium files, which mostly worked, and three months after moving to the cloud platform the design review meetings got shorter, the scheduled client calls disappeared, and the email traffic dropped, because the conversation moved into the tool where an engineer could answer in context instead of three days later. The traceability side matters just as much, giving a medical device client a design history file they can rewind to day one, and giving Glassboard a way to handle the roughly 20 percent of inbound work that amounts to fixing a board after a component went end of life.

The two of them also work through where AI genuinely fits. Requirements are the right starting point because they have always been written down, while layout is a dark art passed between engineers and never documented, which is exactly the training data a model does not have. Grant argues for AI as a filter and a garbage collector that surfaces what deserves an engineer's attention, rather than something making changes on its own.

The conversation closes on supply chain, notification burnout, why Glassboard calls itself the gateway drug dealer for Altium, and DeAndre's point that client visibility is really a retention strategy, the same reason the Uber map made waiting bearable.