Toro TMS Innovation & Technology Culture

How does innovation show up in your company culture?

We have “Wildcard Fridays,” a day every few weeks to loosen the constraints of a typical build cycle and free up space for innovation. Maybe there’s a new technology you’ve been curious about or customer feedback that resonated, and you want to just ship it. People often deliver something genuinely useful because of our customer-first culture. It’s intended to remove friction between a good idea and put value into users’ hands. On the team side, we do visioning exercises and generate North Star artifacts early to see what resonates internally and with customers. At its best, a “crazy eight exercise” might generate multiple radically different ways to solve a problem. 

We emphasize preserving high-level mental models so the product still feels purpose-built even when taking a less traditional approach. We also run a monthly AI share-out across all functions. You get fun cross-functional moments: an engineer helping build a help bot or marketing getting design help on a lead generation tool. Those collisions happen because as a builder, it feels amazing when people love what you make. It all works when leadership recognizes this time as valuable, not as time away from your “real job.”

What’s one recent innovation that improved user or employee experience?

We recently shipped Fleet Groups, a way for customers to slice their experience however they think about their trucks, whether that’s by vehicle type, dispatcher, region, etcetera. Other TMS solutions we’ve observed solve each segmentation need in isolation; one feature for this, another for that. That can feel great if it matches exactly how you operate, but is irrelevant and bloated otherwise. We try to build for flexibility instead. We’d done enough discovery to know a few different ways customers might segment, so we went in with that framing from the start.

The team combined that with a principle we call “opinionated, but flexible” — one unified experience that still feels purpose-built. We initially tested it for reporting only. But once customers got their hands on it, they showed us how it extended across the rest of their workflows. Ship a proof of concept, and users point you the rest of the way. Today, it’s defined in a single place but extendable throughout the experience. It’s the best feeling when you can take something that feels wildly heterogeneous on the surface and deliver a single unified solution that solves both today’s and tomorrow’s problems.

How do you balance experimentation with stability?

We believe you shouldn’t have to sacrifice stability to experiment. It’s about designing systems to de-risk bets while promoting intelligent failures. Concretely, we spike uncertain ideas before committing, validate at lower fidelity when possible, and assess confidence before sizing up investment. We don’t mind a longer cycle if confidence is high, but if it’s not, we find ways to learn faster. We don’t mind being wrong when it produces insight without a huge loss.

Picking the path is a messy art. There are countless decisions a team needs to make, and too much process will smother them. We default to trusting the team to make the call. That spirit of empowerment is hard to kindle and easy to extinguish if you’re not intentional about protecting it.

We have people across the spectrum. Some want to swing big, others prefer incremental, more certain steps. We see that range as a competitive advantage. Healthy tension keeps us from overindexing. The team navigates this together by disagreeing and committing, sharing assumptions, learning from shipping and talking to customers. The balance is less a formula and more a culture of continuously iterating on our approach.