How long have you worked at Brightspot? What brought you here?
I’ve been at Brightspot for just over six years. Before that, I spent seven years at Phase2, where I started as an intern and worked my way from QA engineer to product manager. Phase2 focused on digital experiences, including CMS implementations, so when I heard from Avery Darrah at Brightspot, the opportunity felt like a natural next step. I did well in the interviews, got the offer and have grown professionally since joining. Brightspot does a better job than most companies at recognizing and rewarding internal talent, which has helped me advance into my current role.
Can you tell me about your recent move to the Platform team and some of the first projects that you are leading as a product manager?
Until quite recently, I was working on services for a number of Brightspot customers, most notably the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I’d become really comfortable in that role, but I had always wanted to move to the platform side. The Platform team has a unique and exciting challenge of trying to build features that will meet the needs of all of our customers as opposed to building features for a specific client. I’ve had a little bit of a steep learning curve moving to the Platform team earlier this year, but I feel like I’ve got my sea legs now.
In this new role, I started on the Developer Experience team, which covers a wide range of areas: APIs, GraphQL, developer documentation, non-functional requirements like security and performance, as well as new customer onboarding and training. More recently, I’ve taken on oversight of our AI feature set, which I’m really excited about. I’ve always had a strong interest in AI. My wife is an AI engineer, so it’s a frequent topic of conversation at home. Moving to the Platform team has been a great shift for me and aligns with the kind of problem set I’ve been eager to tackle.
What are you most excited about in the upcoming Brightspot 5.0 release later this year?
The thing I am most excited about for 5.0 is the new UI that comes with the update. Dylan Gang and his team have done some incredible work redesigning the CMS to be more user friendly, more modern and more compact. When I first saw it, I loved what they had done! I’m really excited to get this into our customers’ hands and let them play around with it because I think that they’re going to be genuinely wowed.
What do you enjoy most about your role as a product manager? What do you find most challenging?
There are a couple of really great things about being a product manager. One, I get to work with a lot of really smart people. I love working with engineers. In another life I would have been an engineer, so working in a job where I am adjacent to engineers all the time is perfect. Two, I like that product management allows me to answer a simple, yet difficult question: What is the right thing for us to build? That challenge is super engaging for me.
The biggest challenge? It can be difficult to balance the interests of different stakeholders. I can define requirements and craft an ideal solution but ultimately, the final decision is in the hands of others and is often influenced by forces outside of my control, whether that’s economic factors, technical limitations or other business reasons. Balancing those interests is an inherently difficult part of the job.
What inspired you to become a product manager?
Earlier, I mentioned that I started my career in QA. In that role, I found myself frequently frustrated with the decisions that had been made at the beginning of the process when a feature was designed and requirements were written. I often found myself saying, “I would not have designed or built it this way.” As soon as possible, I shifted out of QA and into a role where I could make the decisions about how things are built. Very simply, I wanted to be the one making decisions rather than interpreting them or ensuring that they had been executed correctly. It has turned into a great career for me.
What is the best professional advice that you have received in your career and how have you applied that advice in your day-to-day work?
Some people swear by “fake it until you make it,” but I’ve always found it better to ask questions. In my experience, people are usually eager to share their knowledge and respect you more for admitting what you don’t know. One of the worst outcomes is pretending to be an expert and then being proven otherwise. I ask questions constantly, own what I don’t know and rely on the expertise of others. It’s essential in my role. Don’t be afraid to ask.
Besides the people, what is your favorite part about working at Brightspot?
Can I just say Anne Ulrich (Director of Details)?! I think Brightspot and the product that we build allows us to tackle a really broad range of problems across the digital space. I feel like a lot of product companies are incredibly narrowly focused. The fact that we’re building a platform for other companies to create their own digital experiences requires us to craft an incredibly varied set of features. Thus, we have to solve an incredibly varied set of problems. That’s great for someone like me, who can get easily bored doing the same thing over and over.
What was the most recent book that you read? Would you recommend it?
I’ve been reading a couple of books but the most recent one is A Mind at Play, which is a biography of Claude Shannon, a mathematician, electrical engineer and computer scientist, who is known as the father of information theory. He’s a fascinating guy and the biography is really well written. I would definitely recommend it.
I heard that you love cooking! What is your favorite dish to cook?
I really love making classic spaghetti sauce. I’ve probably made it a couple hundred times in my life at this point! It’s the kind of thing where I don’t have to follow a recipe. I generally know what goes in and the right proportions, so I just wing it each time. It’s never the same, but it always turns out well. It’s the kind of thing I can eat for a week straight without getting tired of it, plus it leaves room for a bit of experimentation. Also, after you’ve made your spaghetti sauce, the next day you can have “spagh-eggy”, which is spaghetti sauce on pasta with a fried egg on top. If you haven’t tried it before, you should really try it because it’s amazing. That’s a Thomas Neff original!
What is one thing you think people would be surprised to know about you?
This came up recently because I was chatting with some other folks at lunch and they were surprised to learn that my wife and I watch Love Island. It is super trashy TV, but it’s so good! I will specifically say we only watch the UK and Australia versions. We’re purists about that because the show becomes miserable to watch if people don’t have fun accents!
