40 Stories: Darrin Grove of Truefit

Have you ever used an app to track the temperature of your burgers on the grill? How about an app to build a personalized fitness program? If you have, then it’s possible that you used software developed by the Pittsburgh-based company Truefit!  For the past 27 years, Truefit has worked with a diverse range of industries to help create functional and successful software products.

The Tech Council’s Sheena Carroll recently spoke with Darrin Grove, Founder and CEO at Truefit, about the value of teamwork, tech talks with wine tastings, and the company’s human-centered approach to product development:

SC: Congratulations on 27 years in business! Truefit focuses on developing software solutions for customers. Can you tell me more about that?

GROVE: We work with business leaders who create new and next-generation software products. The people we work with have important problems that need to be solved. They know that they need software, but they may not have ever created a software product before. Software is everywhere and is a part of every business. We often help businesses take this journey for the first time: starting with an idea and ending with a commercially successful product. We're helping them get from zero to one in many cases.

In other cases, we work with established software companies with existing products that are very successful in the market. We help them take their products to the next level. That might mean we help them accelerate the roadmap, or it might mean that we help them modernize their platform to introduce a new, more modern approach to the user experience.

SC: The solutions that you offer are broad – I see you’ve done work in app development and IoT and UX design.

GROVE: When you work with Truefit, you're working with a team that includes all the ingredients that you need to go from concept to commercial product. It's a cross functional team including a UX/UI designer, a software architect, typically three engineers, and a QA tester. The team configuration is the magic of Truefit. These teams walk with you on every step of the journey.

We’re combining a business strategy, go-to market strategy and product strategy to make sure that the product is successful. We believe that product strategy and business strategy should go hand-in-hand: if the products work correctly, then the business should be accomplishing its goals, whether that be generating more revenue, scaling, or cutting costs.

Truefit works across a wide variety of industries, which is very fun for us. We love learning new things and working with people in various domains. We just completed a major product launch with Char-Broil, creating a mobile application that connects to multiple brands of their grills. It works on the Apple Watch, so you can monitor the real temperatures and control your grill from your watch. It was launched globally earlier this spring. If you go to Lowe's today, you’ll find grills that use a mobile app that was created in Pittsburgh. I think that's very cool.

We love working with Char-Broil. I just got my own Tahoma 900 grill at home. I'm now a customer and user of the product that we created, which is super fun. And this is my first foray into grilling and smoking with charcoal!

SC: That must be the most fun way to test a new product!

GROVE: It really is. We're also working with another local company who serves to create software platforms for large mutual fund companies. They wanted to solve the problem of automating the process of reconciling financial reports, and they wanted to apply AI to that problem. I didn’t know this, but there are companies where hundreds of people spend their days looking at two screens and reconciling numbers. We are in the process of launching that product with this local company to use advanced, large language models to reconcile financial reports

SC: AI has been a big topic lately. It’s interesting to see the different ways it is used by different industries.

GROVE: It's a very important tool and something that we're paying very close attention to. Software products are all about helping people, right? So, we take a very human-centered approach to product development. The product is there to help people live better lives, or to thrive in some way. If AI is the right solution to help people do that, then that's really how we want to focus on AI. At the end of the day, the software really has to help people thrive.

SC: I’ve heard that Truefit hosts some pretty fun events!

GROVE: We just launched an event series this past month that we call Tasting & Tech Talks, where we're combining wine tasting with learning about technology. For each talk, we invite a customer in to tell their story. There's a lot of lessons learned. It's helpful to unpack their journeys and starting points. What did they learn along the way? What were the surprises? What was effective? We're telling those stories and combining it with an opportunity to experience something delicious.

SC: How do you see Pittsburgh tech changing in the future?

GROVE: Technology in the future is going to look in many ways very much like the technology of the past. It's about helping people: helping them to be more effective, to do their work easier and to live healthier lives. For us, that’s the purpose of software.

What’s not going to change is how things are constantly changing. At one point, we didn't have the internet. Now we do. We didn't have mobile. Now we do. We didn't have AI. Now we do. The tools available to us are constantly changing, but the purpose of technology in our minds stays the same: to help people flourish

SC: Why did you join the Pittsburgh Technology Council?

GROVE: We've been a Tech Council member for all 27 years we’ve been in business. We are big believers in collaboration, mentoring, and participating in the ecosystem. The Tech Council is right at the center of that, so it just makes perfect sense. We've enjoyed being a part of this community all these years.