Posit Presents: A Game of Numbers with PING
The innovators at PING use Posit solutions such as Posit Connect to impact how golf data is analyzed and shared with golfers worldwide. High-level data, once only available to professional players, is now in the hands of everyday golfers thanks to public-facing apps like Ballnamic, which allows golfers to choose the golf ball that best suits their game. Through the use of Shiny apps, Posit Workbench APIs, and Posit Connect, the team at PING can now innovate faster, accelerate product development, and advance the democratization of golf data. Learn more at https://posit.co/about/customer-stories/ping/
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Transcript#
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.
We're living in a world right now where we have more data than we know what to do with almost, right? And so then we turn that corner to what are those insights? What are those specific tools? What's that specific leverage that we can get to our customers? And that's really, I think, what we wake up every day and try to put that thinking cap on and empathize with the end golfer, try to solve problems for them. They might not even know they have.
There's been an explosion of data. So data on how different golf balls fly, data on how golfers move around the course. And then layer on top of that, intelligent analytics on what does that data mean? And so we now need to figure out how to take that data, take those measurements, analyze it and ultimately extract insights to help people play better golf, enjoy the game more. And that requires tools and structures to help us not only process and analyze that data, but then also deliver it to the end user and help the customer understand and leverage those insights that we're getting from these new measurements and new technologies.
It's amazing what smart people can accomplish with good tools. But then being able to take that and quickly turn it into a production grade, commercially viable web app and get that out to the public was, that was a big win. And since then, we've taken that momentum and repeated it several more times. I think we're just at the very beginning of being able to bring this collection of tools to the everyday golfer.
It's amazing what smart people can accomplish with good tools. But then being able to take that and quickly turn it into a production grade, commercially viable web app and get that out to the public was, that was a big win.
The PING team and golf culture
So I was introduced to Ping through a colleague who is a designer here. And I got in, started working part-time in the manufacturing engineering group. And I just love the culture. I love solving problems. I never envisioned that I would use my engineering degree to even get into golf design. So it's been a very fun journey because I've been able to invest time in my game, follow my passion, get better at golf, join the PGA of America, and that's opened up some doors to play competitive tournament golf.
But when that door opened to get in here, I loved it. I loved the culture. I loved learning about all the unknowns, all the golf physics that was there and the curiosity. I was an R&D engineer. He was a designer. He always has just been really consumed with what the customer needs. How do I help somebody play the game more? And I was more on the research side trying to help answer the questions that he was posing.
I think that culture of being so curious about how things work and then being able to kind of take ownership to try to solve a problem and then ultimately turn it into a solution for the customer, right? And I love that. As I started working here at Ping, I started playing golf more and more and that became more of a passion for me even outside of my time here on campus doing the engineering things. And it's really helped me understand the elements of the game that are a challenge, the pain of a player trying to get better. And it's really helped me understand how to ask the right research questions and tackle the right areas to help make golf equipment better.
A lot of new people got introduced to golf during the past few years. And so there's kind of a younger generation, a network of golfers that previously weren't introduced to the game are out there. And so we've tried to just really, both from a product standpoint, from a custom-fitting standpoint, try to continue that momentum.
Engineering roots and the R ecosystem at PING
Ping was founded by a frustrated engineer, Karsten Solheim. He founded the company because he looked at how equipment was designed and said, hey, I could bring my engineering background and make the game way easier through some fundamental physics principles. And it's still kind of in the DNA of Ping in what we do.
Every company develops little centers of excellence, groups of one or two folks who try to solve a problem the best way they can or the best way they know how. One of those that had developed at Ping that I learned about was a group in engineering that were using the R programming language to help visualize and share insights and information about golf data and how we do business. Initially, we started looking at Shiny apps to help just visualize and quickly draw insights from data that we acquired on a range here, through player testing, from a motion capture system.
Shiny apps at Ping really are where the first value from R came out. That's Dr. Hendrickson and Marty and their teams who are the clever folks behind those. A lot of these physics-based and data-driven models that we were developing, we were developing them using RStudio, then using the Shiny framework, developing these dashboards for our engineers to then use these models and use the data we get from player testing and motion capture testing to design equipment.
We went to Doug and we're like, hey, we have these models. We're using this Shiny framework to develop these Shiny dashboards and apps to beta test some different ideas we have for tools that would help both engineers as well as the end consumer. Dr. Hendrickson and his team had identified R as something they wanted to work on and something they wanted to do, and they had built a handful of Shiny applications. But they did it without the support of IT and without the support of the larger corporate digital strategy, because they had to. They were solving a problem. They were innovating.
Scaling with Posit Connect
So I was glad to be able to come in and say, that's fantastic, but that doesn't scale. Let's try some other techniques. And that's where Posit Connect came in as not only providing us the ability to publish these tools that we're developing, but also host APIs and help us move toward consumer-facing applications where we can then build out a front end and then hook that into these APIs in Posit Connect.
The big proof of value came the first time that I convinced them to, instead of creating a Shiny app, create a Plumber API. And then can I share that Plumber API with a team within Ping who can build a web interface around it and publish that to the public? That really was the, like, okay, this is going to work. Instead of rebuilding all of our algorithms and fundamental modeling, we're able to use APIs that drive that front end that our customers experience without having to rebuild our prototype. We just built our front end right on top of it.
Posit Connect gives a tool set to program real JSON-based APIs. That's fundamental. If you can't do that, you're going to have a really hard time working with any other system. How it works is that we take those models and then we're able to create in that logic and develop some APIs, and through the Plumber framework and through Connect, host those and then provide this foundation for other tools to be developed.
Shiny and Posit Connect give us that ability to, in a careful way, in a protected way with user access controls and a reliable deployment process, it gives us that ability to have their projects be shared around the company in a controlled, safe, responsible way. What started with me kind of playing with it and prototyping quickly evolved into a number of engineers wanting to get their hands dirty, make their own dashboards, do their own data analysis, and it exploded really quick.
To me, what Posit Connect did for us was really brought that likelihood of getting value from the investment and the time and the expertise in data science that shortened that lifecycle a lot to, can we get this out? Can we build a consumer-facing product that has commercial value quickly and cost-efficiently and try to see if it's worth it? And I'm happy to say that the solution we've got in place right now lets us experiment really, really fast.
The future of golf data
It's a lot of fun to be able to kind of help build this ecosystem around data, not only data when you're hitting balls on a driving range or when you're testing clubs or hitting in a simulator bay, but more importantly, what is your data on the golf course while you're playing golf, and how can you tie those things together and make better product decisions, custom-fitting decisions, where should you be practicing your game, where are you going to get the most leverage from your practice and your training, and it's still early for us to make those tools available to a lot of golfers at scale.
Looking at Posit, and specifically Posit Connect, was not a short-term solution. I saw it as a strategic component of a long-term vision for digital technology at PING, if it worked out, which I'm really glad to say it did. I don't see that runway ending. It's a foundational component to how we continue innovating.
I saw it as a strategic component of a long-term vision for digital technology at PING, if it worked out, which I'm really glad to say it did. I don't see that runway ending. It's a foundational component to how we continue innovating.