Launching a valuable business is one major challenge, and ensuring that it has longevity is a completely separate one — one that product teams across all industries are responsible for.
We spoke with product leaders at local tech companies to learn about their strategies for “future-proofing” their teams. Read on to learn how their hiring and management styles are reflective of this long-term focus.
Adtech company DoubleVerify uses machine learning and big data — two tech trends that are constantly changing. Senior Director of Product Management Vidhan Srivastava explained how his team is able to stay ahead.
What’s the number one problem your product solves, and how is your tech keeping you ahead of the competition?
DoubleVerify's products authenticate the quality of digital media for the world's largest brands. They ensure that ads are fully viewed by a real person in a brand-safe environment. Technology resides at the heart of our products and company culture. While on one end, we leverage sophisticated machine learning models and telemetry analyses to identify brand-safe and fraud-free environments, on the other end we use cutting-edge big data technologies to analyze trillions of attributes and drive superior outcomes for our clients.
When it comes to hiring, what skill sets let you know a candidate will be able to keep your product future-proof?
People on our team must be passionate, authentic in their interactions and inquisitive about problems they experience on a daily basis. They should also be collaborative in working with internal and external partners and results-oriented.
When it comes to future-proofing a fintech platform like YieldStreet, diversifying the members of the product team is key. Director of Product Glenna DeRoy explained how the team’s strength lies in having product managers with different areas of expertise.
What’s the number one problem your product solves, and how is your tech keeping you ahead of the competition?
YieldStreet is striving to democratize access to alternative investments, previously available only to institutional investors. Not only do we provide access to these investments, but we do so in a more transparent way than traditional financial services. YieldStreet is committed to an “investor-first” approach.
It wouldn't be possible to do what we do without a solid technical foundation. Every PM is able to impact critical areas of the business. PMs work with multiple teams to source, underwrite and process hundreds of thousands of investor payments. We strive to improve the quality of the investor experience on our platform.
When it comes to hiring, what skill sets let you know a candidate will be able to keep your product future-proof?
Our product team lives by the “investor-first” mantra. The key to our current and future success is understanding why investors choose our product based on the problems solved. This will evolve over time, but when we analyze the data, we will continue to ask questions to better understand our investors' needs, delivering value to them for years to come. We are collaborative and have a bias for action. We're passionate about YieldStreet's vision, and when scaling our team, we look for PMs who have been successful in a variety of environments and who come with different areas of experience.
All of the rules and regulations that surround the healthcare industry can add an extra layer of complexity to tasks that are already very complicated. Senior Director of Product Management David Greenfield explained how healthcare analytics company Crossix cuts through all of those layers to provide value for their clients.
What’s the number one problem your product solves, and how is your tech keeping you ahead of the competition?
Pharma marketers need a privacy-safe way to tie marketing investments to health outcomes. To solve this problem, we need to connect very large data sets from many different sources as rapidly as possible, without sacrificing accuracy. We need to cleanse the data, process it, run it through a proprietary matching and analytics process and publish to a user interface. In order to be successful, it’s critical we use technology to expedite data integration and transformation, leverage distributed computing to process large data quickly and use statistical methods to intelligently fill gaps in data.
When it comes to hiring, what skill sets let you know a candidate will be able to keep your product future-proof?
It’s important that we add people who can understand the client perspective and also plan with an engineering mindset. While we don’t need the product team to implement and design solutions, what we build is often so integrated with data processing and analytics that it’s hard to completely separate the business case and the details of data and processing. It’s important that our product team can fully understand which use cases can be supported with minor configurations to existing technology and which changes require significant new development efforts.
