Tell us about your professional journey.
After a degree in engineering, I started working in a consulting firm in Paris that specialised in the transportation industry, working with high-profile clients such as Air France and SNCF. A few years at this firm led me to join the Expedia Group in 2013, where I worked until I joined WeMaintain in September 2022.
Working at Expedia was an incredible opportunity for me to learn the best practices of Product Management in a fast-paced and innovative tech environment. A few invaluable things I learnt were:
- The ability to navigate between strategy and tactical details in order to find new and better ways to harness technology to bring positive change to people and businesses;
- How to set boundaries and structure the approach. This was important as there were a lot of opportunities and ambiguity, but staying calm and prioritising the needs of the business was crucial;
- How to be proactive in growing a team, not only in size, but in personal development, by looking for new opportunities to advance their skillsets.
What made you want to join WeMaintain?
First and foremost, the culture! Coming from an international environment, I was pleased to see the amazing culture the founders had built based on their own international backgrounds.
The company was at the perfect stage for me to bring my experience of mature, complex and international product organisations and scale WeMaintain’s product team to the next level.
Ultimately, I don’t feel I could fully commit to a role without believing in what the company is trying to achieve, so with WeMaintain, the mission was an influencing factor! ‘To put the best of people and technology at the heart of the built environment’ is more than a statement; it truly guides the company’s operations.
I was pleased to see the amazing culture the founders had built based on their own international backgrounds.
How has your previous experience set you up for our end-to-end approach?
Just like building operations, the travel space is a very complex ecosystem that involves a lot of intermediaries, and as a result, customer experiences are negative more often than not.
As a Travel Agency, our systems needed to connect to suppliers’ systems and other players’ operating parts of the travel experience both upstream and downstream, so we could streamline the overall experience and bring innovation along the way.
For example, as an Online Travel Agency (OTA) offering end-to-end services to travellers, we would automatically let the hotel know if a traveller’s flight is cancelled or delayed. Appropriate actions could then be taken to cancel a hotel night or give a heads-up about a late check-in. Only with an end-to-end approach connecting all parts of the customer experience, can OTAs do this.
It is similar in building operations, to succeed, we need to unify and modernise a fragmented industry - in other words, ‘platformizing’ the industry. If you don’t build a fully integrated system that can easily talk to other components, customer/user experiences will continue to be fragmented.
How do you envision using technology to platformize our industry?
In order to transition to a platform model, it is vital to unify the industry by connecting all players. Building operations is a truly fragmented industry today, and only a digital approach can help solve existing challenges and modernise operations.
At WeMaintain, we are using technology to:
- Effectively and securely integrate with other players in the industry to share data and processes through APIs or any reliable type of connectivities (e.g. firms who provide compliance reports, call centres);
- Capture real-time data anytime, anywhere, thanks to our IoT devices, in conjunction with the correct monitoring and alerting in place to augment the work done by our engineers;
- Build a platform that acts as a single source of visibility for our customers, consolidating all data from IoT and field engineers, making our services reliable, accurate and complete;
- Create delightful and modern experiences for all users, whether that’s engineers, tenants or property managers.
In a great product team, there is a strong sense of belonging, which in turn makes people feel empowered in making decisions as the level of trust is high.
What does a great product team look like to you?
- Ownership & accountability:
One that runs on ownership and accountability, in that each team or squad understands how they contribute to the broader product and wider company strategy. In a team like this, there is a strong sense of belonging, which in turn makes people feel empowered in making decisions as the level of trust is high.
- Customer/user-centric:
Working from the customer’s perspective is the key to developing the right product. A great product team must be humble, empathise with users and have excellent listening skills in order to determine what truly matters to them. This is where innovation comes from - designing and building solutions that users love and will continue to use.
- Test and learn culture:
A great product team will have the ability to iterate fast, fail fast and learn a lot. In these situations, speed matters! You need to measure small experiments, get the learnings and iterate.
According to you, what sets our product apart in the industry?
We are the only platform out there that is on track to unify and modernise a fragmented industry. Our system already operates across all verticals of regulatory maintenance and has the power to scale to all technical services quickly. This is something that is actually hard to build.
If you add to that our ability to augment human work and go end-to-end on each of these verticals, you have a magic formula for a successful product!
If you had to choose only one, the best of people or best of technology?
People!
Technology is, of course, a crucial element for us to modernise and innovate within this industry, but without the people in the product teams developing this tech, without our engineers deploying the technology and their expertise, we would not be where we are today.
WeMaintain started with people and a mission to empower them and continues to demonstrate the importance of people through our operations.
Find out more about our technology here.
