What is your favorite restaurant?
My favorite restaurant is Thai at Laurel, located in Laurel Towne Centre, MD, just off Route 1. It’s my usual spot for Friday night dinners, with the Crispy Duck with Basil Leaves and Drunken Noodles with Pork being my go-to dishes. I love the mix of flavors and spices that come with Thai dishes.
Being that your background is in Mechanical Engineering, tell us about your journey to Product Management.
I am from a family of engineers, so it was no surprise I ended up pursuing and starting my career as an engineer. The passion for engineering started as a kid, when I used to take really anything apart and put it back together to see how it worked. This interest stuck with me all throughout childhood and led me to major in mechanical engineering.
Fast forward to after finishing a grad degree and several summer internships, I ended up working for United Technologies Corporation, an aerospace company, as a project engineer in Connecticut for several years before landing a product manager job at Alarm.com on the devices team. Coming from a mechanical engineering background, I had next to no knowledge of how software development worked, but the skill of “taking things apart” is one that has continued to help me be successful and is still valuable to me today.
You are a Senior Product Manager on the Sensors & Analytics pod. Walk us through what that looks like.
Our pod is primarily responsible for building or improving all things related to the software automation, enterprise control or data analytics features we offer customers to meet their HVAC, energy, water, video and noise monitoring needs. The Sensors portion being the smart devices installed by our customers and the Analytics portion being the information those devices collect that we translate into new products and features.
We’ve built automation features like one that automatically heats or cools a rental unit prior to guest check-in and reporting features like one that documents all water issues detected by smart sensors across a community and delivers a digital report to a property manager every month.
How do you define product success?
To me a product is successful if it provides any amount of value to our customers and does so in a way that allows us to learn more about our customers and their needs.
For example, value to a customer could mean solving a problem, saving time, reducing an expense, or it could mean being reliable, fast or high quality. If a customer chooses to use our product over the many other options they have available to them, that is a success to me as well as an opportunity to learn in what ways our products can be of even more use to a customer.
What is a recent project for the Sensors & Analytics pod that excites you?
The Enterprise Water Incident Report. This project addresses a significant concern for our customers: water damage detection and prevention. The value of detecting and preventing potential water damage is huge, as it helps our customers evade major immediate expenses.
The report we’ve developed allows customers to have a comprehensive overview of both their active and recently resolved water issues – illustrating the impact of constant monitoring and automation.
What’s exciting about this project is its potential to become an integral part of our customers’ weekly operations. The report is designed to help them stay on top of any unresolved water issues, thus reducing the impact on their residents and guests. This project is a meaningful example of our commitment to providing practical, effective solutions for our customers.
View our open positions here by clicking on ‘All Departments’ and selecting PointCentral.
