What do you do here at Valon?

ALBERT: I’m currently a Product Manager working on the Escrow team. We’re building new products to help our homeowners and operations team manage their escrow accounts, and ensure that each loan’s property insurance and taxes are paid on time. 

How did you get into product management?

ALBERT: I studied electrical engineering in college, and after graduating, worked as a product engineer for a few years before jumping into the startup world. I worked on a variety of startups and wore many hats: everything from developing networking hardware that provided Internet access to rural parts of America to building a restaurant platform that allowed customers to view menus and place orders via QR codes (years before Covid made them mainstream).

Eventually, I joined Instagram as a Product Manager. I spent most of my time building new e-commerce ad products to help people discover new brands and enabling them to learn more about the products in-app. But after 4+ years, I wanted to bet on myself and join a smaller company where the impact was more attributable to my own actions.

‍What’s something you feel like you’ve learned in your time here at Valon?

ALBERT: For me, talking to our servicing team members directly and often is a critical part of the product development lifecycle, even more so than at a consumer facing company. 

At a big tech company, there are mature experimentation platforms and data sets you can rely on to make decisions. In fact, one of the primary ways decisions are made is by spending lots of time looking at experiments and seeing how new features impact metrics. While we do have data at Valon, many products we build are used by a comparatively small group of operations team members, and it’s much more effective to have a consistent dialogue to learn from their experience and understand how they think about the world. The inputs into building products are just very different. 

In addition, I’ve learned to become more self-sufficient. To unblock myself and move faster, I’ve learned and written my own queries, put together some (basic) designs in Figma, and committed code.

‍What advice would you give to someone who wants to work in product?

ALBERT: People often ask me if you need a technical background to be a product manager. I don’t think you do, even though it is helpful. I have worked with PMs that come from a variety of backgrounds, and some of the best PMs I know have never written a line of code in their lives. There are many ways to be successful as a PM, and it’s important to know how to play to your strengths and work with people that can supplement your weaknesses. 

What kind of qualities would you look for in a good product manager?

ALBERT: Generally, I really enjoy working with people who have a high “slope”; people who are hungry to learn, constantly looking to invest in their own growth, and willing to get their hands dirty—they don’t feel like anything is beneath them.

There are also a common set of attributes that all good PMs must have: an understanding and appreciation for their users’ problems, a clear vision for what product your team is building and why, and knowing how to bring teams together. All of these can be trained and learned over time, regardless of someone’s background.

‍What’s a challenge you’ve been able to tackle in your role?

ALBERT: Building the foundations of our servicing platform was very challenging, because we started from scratch and built all of the tooling, processes, and systems from the ground up. At another startup, you may have the luxury of starting with a small MVP and expanding the feature set gradually over time. However, when it comes to mortgage servicing, there is a large feature set that is required to be supported from the very beginning. This requires ruthless prioritization and determining how to put together scrappy processes to support the needs of the business with the limited resources we have.

Over time, we’ve been able to replace the initial parts of our system with more automation. And now that we have this foundation, we’re constantly thinking about how we can leverage our technology and platform to become significantly better than the market standard. We’re really excited to see how we can continue to become more efficient as our product matures. 

Where do you look for inspiration?

ALBERT: I always love learning how others solve problems in unique ways. I recently saw an article about a Japanese app that gamified the inspection of manhole covers. Instead of having city inspectors inspect every single manhole cover in the city, they built a game where citizens could take photos of manhole covers to “collect” them and earn points. After the app launched, every manhole cover in the city was able to be manually inspected via the photos that people took within a week, saving money and time. That’s an awesome product with meaningful impact. 

If you’re interested in joining Albert as part of Valon’s team, check out our open career opportunities.