Brilliant Home Product Director on Building A Full Stack

Full Stack Development: Product Vision

Currently, I work at Brilliant Home to create smart home solutions. When looking at our full stack development, we want to make the smart home feel as natural as the home today. Our founders like to say that whenever you think about your car – do you call it a smart car? Probably not – it’s just a car. So, the smart home is just going to be “a home” in ten years.

Whenever you think about smart home technology you think about using your phone for everything. We’re trying to go about that in a different way. We’re saying why isn’t it in the wall itself. Why isn’t it part of your home? That’s the goal of Brilliant.

Many of you are all familiar with voice technology. But, is that the only way you should be operating your home?

Probably not. Let’s say you have kids or some guests over. That doesn’t really make smart home technology accessible for them. So, our goal is to democratize smart home products and really make it so anyone in the home can use your products. 

There’s actually a lot in the Brilliant home system. You have a microphone, camera, speaker, touch screen, ambient light sensor, temperature sensor, and even more. Clearly, this multitude of touchpoints requires full stack product development to balance each of these features. We want to make sure that each person is able to use whatever they want, whenever they want. So through motion, through touch, through whatever you want, you should be able to control your smart home.

I don’t know if you guys have any smart home devices besides the likes of Google home. But if you do, you probably have a folder that has every single smart home device in there. Well, those days are over because we developed an app that allows you to control them all. When you think about it, we’re probably the only agnostic smartphone platform out there.

Identifying Key Skills for Product Launches 

At Brilliant, I lead product management, user experience, and lead product analytics. We launched our product in September. Through that time, in the first six months, I was really making sure the product is ready for production. It’s all fine when it’s a prototype, but you then realize that it’s not ready for production. So I needed to pick up a lot of different things to successfully launch the product. That means learning product design. I was not a designer before now. I also knew I knew how to do analytics before. But I now have to set up the entire analytics framework. I’ve had to really pick on a lot of different things grow the product organization. All this means is that I need to be a full stack product manager.

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