Findigs, Inc. Leadership & Management

Tell us a little bit about yourself. What brings you to Findigs?

I’ve been doing product management in some capacity for about 15 years now. About 10 years of that time was spent at digital agencies, working with a broad spectrum of clients in sectors ranging from finance to live entertainment to online retail. With each client, my goal was always to take a strategic approach helping solve user and customer problems to drive business growth and success. Outside of specific projects, I’ve led teams of product managers, mentored early career product managers and created internal product processes to help teams work more efficiently. 

Findigs is at a really exciting place right now. Our growth over the last several months, particularly after our recent Series B funding, created a great opportunity to evolve the product craft here. We’re solving complex problems for property managers and creating the simplest experience possible for renters. Our success depends on how well we serve both sides of the equation, and our product organization needs to reflect this interconnectedness.

How would you describe your approach to leadership, and how do you plan on building team culture?

One of the most challenging aspects of being a product manager is that, unlike design or engineering, there’s typically just one PM working on a particular project or workstream. As the team grows, I’m looking to create opportunities to work together to solve problems in real time and leverage the unique skills and experiences that the folks on my team have. For early career product managers especially, direct partnership with other product managers can be so influential to growth and development. 

More than anything, I’m here to foster a strong culture of knowledge sharing and collaboration, so my team always knows they have support when they need it, and we can bounce ideas off each other to arrive at the best solution. 

Outside of the direct team, it’s crucial for product managers to collaborate often across all parts of the business—not only with design and engineering but also with finance, sales, customer success or any team that plays a role in the product’s success. It’s a priority of mine to promote transparency and keep communication running smoothly in both directions.

What upcoming project or initiative are you most excited to tackle? 

Right now, I’m excited about continuing to push Findigs’ fraud prevention forward. In the rental industry, the incidence of fraud is steadily on the rise — and constantly growing more sophisticated. This could be anything from a prospective resident providing fraudulent income documents to outright identity theft. The financial repercussions of fraud are serious and can be incredibly costly for property managers. 

Potential fraud comes in so many forms that you need to be thinking about it from every angle — there’s certainly no “one size fits all” solution. The complexity, and the need to stay 10 steps ahead at all times, is part of what makes it such an interesting problem. I believe this is where we as an organization can ultimately provide differentiated value to our customers while materially improving the rental application experience for everybody.

What’s your North Star right now — and why does it matter?

Our North Star is the reliability of our property management system integrations. My team builds the connections between our platform and the systems our clients already use to ensure their data lives in one place, in the tools they work in every day, and the integration stability is a big part of what they’re expecting.

When it comes to integrations, a higher success rate means less friction for clients and a lighter load for my team and the teams that depend on us. It also frees up bandwidth to onboard more customers and start integrating with new partners to keep the business growing. Every bit of reliability we win back is time we get to spend proactively tackling new challenges instead of reacting to the last thing that broke.

What metric shows progress?

Our key metric is the integration success rate itself, which over the last six months went from 93 percent to 99 percent.

A year ago, we had no real way to measure this. Someone would report an issue, we’d fix it and then move to the next one. We couldn’t step back and spot systemic problems or see our success rate across the board. When I moved into the engineering manager role, that was the first thing I wanted to fix because you can’t hit a goal you can’t measure, and you can’t solve a systemic issue you can’t see.

We built the visibility first, and now we have short-term health dashboards for day-to-day monitoring, plus long-term success rate dashboards that track where we are and catch big issues before they blow up. We can break things down by partner and by operation, and we can monitor and alert on a per client basis so we can dig in and find the specific issues hurting us most.

Which recurring leader behavior keeps teams aligned week to week?

The habit my team relies on most is operational alignment. We take a top-level company goal and break it all the way down into problems small enough that any engineer can grab one and fix it and then connect it back up so everyone can see how their piece adds to the bigger picture. Seeing the impact of their work on the business as a whole is what keeps my team motivated and keeps us honest about whether we’re working on the right things.

I tell my team all the time: If we can’t explain why we’re working on something, we’re probably working on the wrong thing. My job is to make sure we’re building things that actually matter to the business and that every engineer understands why. Whether it’s a team meeting, sprint planning or a one-on-one, I keep coming back to that question. Knowing what to build is one thing, but knowing why you’re building it is what ultimately keeps a team aligned.