ServiceTitan Exteriors: Lessons from a Customer Turned ServiceTitan Employee

Dan Lizette spent nearly five years at Mattioni Plumbing, Heating & Cooling — first as call center manager, then as Director of Process Improvement — before joining ServiceTitan as Delivery Manager for Exteriors. In a recent episode of Mastering ServiceTitan, host Josh Lu sits down with Lizette just five weeks into his new role to capture what it looks like when a power user crosses to the other side of the platform. The conversation covers what ServiceTitan has built specifically for roofing and exteriors, what Lizette wishes he'd known sooner as a customer, and why every shop needs a designated ServiceTitan champion.

What ServiceTitan Has Built for Roofing and Exteriors

The trades share a common core inside ServiceTitan — customer records, jobs, estimates, Marketing Pro, the phone system — but once you get into the specifics of roofing, the platform has gone considerably further than a few renamed fields. Lizette describes whole bolt-on modules built from the ground up for exterior workflows, including:

• Spec-based estimate templates that auto-ingest measurements from aerial companies

• Branded contracts sent directly from the shop

• Insurance and production work queues with roofing-specific stages and naming conventions

"I remember seeing the production work queue, and you could see that it was for roofing because it's got stages and names that are relevant to a roofing workflow," Lizette says. "But all I could think was, 'Oh, HVAC and plumbing could probably find some kind of use for that.'"

Reporting is another area where new capabilities are coming. Lizette previewed an upcoming sales reporting feature built specifically for roofing — tracking estimates presented, options offered (good/better/best), and close rates at the rep level. The intent isn't to get close to what roofing owners need. It's to answer exactly the right questions about in-home sales performance.

What Lizette Wishes He'd Known as a Customer

Mattioni signed up for ServiceTitan in 2016. Lizette joined in 2021. By his own account, there were roughly seven years of feature releases he was never fully informed about. Five weeks into working inside the platform, he's already identified Core features he didn't know existed — features that would have saved meaningful time.

Two examples he calls out specifically:

• Units of Measure in Inventory: Allows technicians to log usage in the unit they're actually using (ounces of refrigerant, feet of pipe) while the system replenishes inventory based on the container or bulk unit being ordered. Available to Core customers, no upgrade required.

• Content Portal: Lets you push announcements and training videos directly to field staff through the mobile app, with expiration dates and audience targeting. No Dropbox links, no YouTube workarounds.

"You don't know what you don't know," Lizette says. "You may see the title of something in Academy or see something in the knowledge base and be like, 'What's that?' And you may just pass it off because you think it doesn't apply to you, where in reality, that may be the key to saving hours and hours."

His recommendation: treat the ServiceTitan Academy and release notes as ongoing responsibilities, not one-time onboarding tasks. There are certified administrator programs that go even deeper. For shops that have been on the platform for years without a dedicated person owning it, there's likely more ROI sitting untapped than they realize.

Why Every Shop Needs a ServiceTitan Champion

This is the section of the conversation Lizette leans hardest into — and for good reason. The platform releases features constantly. A CSM can't walk every customer through every update. Without someone inside the shop who's actively tracking releases and translating them into decisions, most of those features will go unnoticed.

Lizette's description of what a champion actually does is specific:

• Reads release notes and shares relevant updates to department heads and managers

• Attends webinars and completes Academy courses on new features

• Brings ServiceTitan topics to leadership meetings with a point of view: this just came out, here's what it does, should we turn it on?

• Pursues the certified administrator program when possible

The champion doesn't have to be an owner or a GM. They just need enough platform exposure and organizational access to drive those conversations. Lizette points to call center managers as a natural fit — particularly in shops using Contact Center Pro, where virtual agents are absorbing inbound volume and freeing up that manager's bandwidth. Marketing managers or operations leads with cross-departmental visibility are also strong candidates.

"If you're trying to maximize or master ServiceTitan, having a champion in your shop, somebody who owns ServiceTitan inside your shop, somebody who's going to read those release notes… you will get so much benefit from somebody remaining laser-focused on this."

Getting Reluctant Teams On Board

Lizette has fielded this question repeatedly — at Pantheon presentations, at Toolbox Live events, in one-on-one conversations with shop owners who are personally bought in but facing resistance from their teams. His honest assessment: there's no universal answer.

What has worked is starting small. Piloting a feature with one or two technicians, CSRs, or salespeople, demonstrating results, and letting those results make the case. For people who resist change on principle, the more useful angle is connecting the tool to the outcome they already care about — time saved, staff performance, revenue. The goal isn't to win a philosophical argument about technology. It's to show how a specific feature solves a specific problem they're already frustrated by.

"What if I could cut four hours out of that?" Lizette says. "They may say, 'I don't really like change, and yes, I like how I do things, but I could use four hours.'"

Dan Lizette recently joined Josh Lu on the Mastering ServiceTitan podcast to discuss:

• [1:13] How Dan’s customer experience compelled him to join ServiceTitan

• [7:32] ServiceTitan’s growing commitment to roofing and exteriors

• [16:10] What Dan wishes he had known when he first dove into ServiceTitan

• [23:03] Why every shop needs a ServiceTitan Champion

Check out these resources mentioned during the podcast:

• Just Start AI: Future-Proofing Your Business With Artificial Intelligence

You can find this interview and many more by subscribing to Mastering ServiceTitan on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or here.