Back when Len Musielak worked on the trading floor of the Chicago Board Options Exchange, his team tried everything to retire a fleet of loud, expensive, three-ply impact printers that served no real purpose. The technology was outdated. No one kept the tickets they printed. And the solution was obvious.
Except it wasn't.
"Finally one of the traders said, 'When it makes the noise, that's how I know I did a trade,'" Musielak recalled. "That's how I know to look at my screen."
The team tried dings. Alarms. Nothing worked. So Musielak recorded the printers, handed the sound file to the vendor and had it programmed as the trade alert. The printers went away. The traders got what they needed. And eventually, they turned the sound off themselves.
He's thinking about that story a lot these days.
Musielak is Vice President of Technology and Digital Transformation at Goettl Air Conditioning & Plumbing, a multi-state trades company based in the Southwest. And right now, he's navigating a change that feels familiar: moving hundreds of field technicians from ServiceTitan's legacy mobile app to the new Field Mobile App before peak season arrives.
"We don't want the technology to get in the way of our field technicians," he said. "They want to go out and fix a darn air conditioner."
Less App. More Wrench.
That's the promise at the center of ServiceTitan's Field Mobile App—and why Goettl set an internal deadline of April to complete the transition, well ahead of the brutal Southwest summer that defines its business calendar.
"We would rather switch on our terms," Musielak said.
The logic is straightforward: don't hand your technicians a new tool when they're already buried. Get the change behind you. Let them get comfortable. Then let them run.
The new app is built around that idea. Things such as scanning equipment barcodes now happen natively, eliminating the need for a third-party app. Photos, once uploaded one at a time, one agonizing wait at a time, can now be captured in batches and uploaded in the background while the tech moves on.
Pricebook updates push automatically from the cloud. And Atlas, ServiceTitan's AI assistant, is built directly into the app, so when a technician needs to know what filter size was used on the last visit, they ask instead of calling the office or clicking through screens.
The goal isn't just fewer steps. It's fewer minutes inside the app, period. More time turning wrenches. More jobs completed.
"We want to make things as easy as possible for our technicians," Musielak said. “They already have several apps they need to use. We need to be subtracting, not adding to that list.”
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The Squeaky Wheel Problem
Musielak keeps a note from his executive MBA program, written in 2016: Be careful what type of customers you listen to.
He applies the same logic to rollouts, and the inevitable issues. Some features aren't where they used to be. Muscle memory keeps sending people to the wrong corner of the screen. He's heard it before—in finance, in healthcare, in every industry where technology moved faster than habit.
His strategy is to seed early adopters in the field and let them talk to their peers.
At Goettl, he's seen what happens when you solve the right problems first, which is the case with the new Field Mobile App. Duplicate pricebook entries—fixed. Photo uploads that stopped a technician cold—fixed. A third-party barcode scanner burning money and generating tickets—gone. Each win built a little more trust, and made the next change easier to accept.
Because of technician feedback at Goettl, the right problems were fixed.
"We take every piece of feedback seriously," Musielak said. "If something is genuinely broken or harder than it needs to be, that's on us to solve.
"No matter when you change, no matter how perfect it is, you're going to get pushback. But that doesn't mean you stop listening. You figure out what the pushback is actually telling you."
For Goettl, the transition window is now. Before peak season, when there's no margin for adjustment. Then, there’s room to respond if something isn't working.
The noise will quiet, just like it did with those printers. The goal is to earn that, not just wait for it.
