#SW17 Product Definition and User Influence: Robert Jost

Who decides what’s new in SOLIDWORKS? Product Definition team members are a major component in determining and defining enhancements and new functionality included within the SOLIDWORKS products each year. They meet face-to-face with SOLIDWORKS customers to discuss what’s working, what isn’t, and what they would like to see in the future. These customer visits are fantastic opportunities for you to connect with SOLIDWORKS directly, and let us know what we can do to help make your jobs easier. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to be talking with members of the Product Definition team for an inside look at some of the ways SOLIDWORKS 2017 was directly defined by user influence like yours!

As a product definition senior manager, Rob Jost mainly focuses on the sketching and surfacing capabilities in SOLIDWORKS. For SOLIDWORKS 2017, he had a hand in the Wrap Feature enhancements; “This feature was updated with a few, although pretty big, enhancements due to our users needing it to do more. It’s a great feature but was initially very limited. Our users are pretty talented and capable of creating some very complex geometry, and this feature would not work on non-analytical surfaces. For most, that’s a very unrealistic limitation.”

These improvements were initiated for a few reasons. Not only were there several SPRs with multiple hits on them but Rob also received many requests at SOLIDWORKS World from users; “they made sure they let me know it was too limited and not capable of working on the type of geometry they needed it to work on.” In addition, Rob also knew firsthand about the limitations of the feature due to his background as a designer.

The major benefit to these enhancements is that they’re a huge timesaver! “Users that wanted to wrap a detail such as a logo, or a simple pattern, onto a complex surface had to engage in lengthy workarounds to get the right geometry. This results in a long Feature Manager tree and can have a negative effect on performance.”

For Rob, the most enjoyable part of developing these enhancements is “seeing SOLIDWORKS solve a problem that used to take customers hours in a matter of seconds. It reminds me of how powerful the software really is, and how there’s still so much more we can do. This was a very “math heavy” problem that we needed to solve, and seeing the developer dive in and get it done was very impressive.”

To read more about Rob and his role in Product Definition, check out this previous post. As always, thanks for reading! Let us know what you think about the SOLIDWORKS Wrap Feature Enhancements in SOLIDWORKS 2017 in the comments below!

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Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corp. offers complete 3D software tools that let you create, simulate, publish, and manage your data. SolidWorks products are easy to learn and use, and work together to help you design products better, faster, and more cost-effectively. The SolidWorks focus on ease-of-use allows more engineers, designers and other technology professionals than ever before to take advantage of 3D in bringing their designs to life.