Jennifer Sand on Designing Products for Physical Security and Championing Women in the Workplace
After years in cybersecurity, Jennifer Sand was eager to work on a product that keeps people safe physically. As the vice president of product management for Everbridge’s critical event management platform, she gets to do just that. Below, Sand describes how her team is helping move customers from managing communication during an emergency to taking action. Plus, she shares how, through the Everbridge’s Women’s Leadership Group, she’s working to fortify the company with more diverse candidates.
What do you do at Everbridge?
I’m the vice president of product management for our CEM, or critical event management, platform. Essentially that means I’m responsible for strategy across all CEM products — ensuring that they integrate well, identifying gaps in our capabilities, and figuring out how to fill them.
Tell us about your background and why you joined the team.
Before Everbridge, I worked in product management and UX at a cloud security startup called CloudLock. Their products identify sensitive information, anomalous user behavior, and risky third party apps on platforms like Google Drive, Salesforce, Box, and Dropbox. Then about a year and a half ago, a former colleague reached out to me about the VP opening here.
Getting into the physical security realm was exciting to me. My previous experience was in cybersecurity, and I was fascinated by the idea of applying technology to problems in the physical world. And Everbridge had a lot of what I look for in any new role. I like working on cloud solutions, and on products that matter — solutions that are must-haves, not nice-to-haves — so the mission of keeping people safe and businesses running was a good fit. It checked all the boxes.
“I like working on products that matter — solutions that are must-haves, not nice-to-haves.”
How does your team collaborate with others across Everbridge?
Product management in general requires a lot of collaboration; we’re the nexus between several different departments. With Engineering, we define the problems we need to solve for our customers, and they figure out exactly how. With Sales, we define what we’re selling and work with Marketing to design a repeatable strategy they can use. We also work closely with UX to ensure we provide an optimal product experience for our customers.
My approach to building products is to engage with customers early and often. With our new crisis management product, for example, we talked with customers before we built anything at all, and then put prototypes and early versions in front of them as we iterated. Because they’d given us feedback on designs and UI every step of the way, the product was already vetted and we had customer buy-in when we launched.
We’ll keep listening going forward to understand the new threats our customers are facing and how their world is evolving. That will allow us to further streamline their work and find new opportunities to automate processes — so we can either prevent issues or get them back up and running that much faster.
Tell us more about launching the Everbridge Crisis Management product.
That project was super exciting, for a couple of reasons. One, the product itself is exciting because it’s moving us beyond helping customers simply manage their communications to helping them take action. They can respond to events more quickly and better coordinate across distributed teams.
“We’re deciding what data models and terminology to use to make Everbridge easy to understand for our customers — and scalable, as well.”
It was also exciting to see how well our team worked during development. I was pregnant when I joined Everbridge, and I went on leave while we were still incubating the Everbridge Crisis Management product. I tried to put some core tenets in place: build iteratively, not incrementally; focus on workflow first and add features into that workflow; get customers involved as much as we can within reason. But then I was completely MIA for three months.
When I got back, the product looked completely different — which was fantastic, because it meant the rest of the team had been gathering and applying customer feedback. We already had 23 early adopters engaged.
What challenges do you face in your role?
One challenge is how to quickly deliver new capabilities while still sustaining a very large existing business. We move pretty fast here, and there’s always something new happening. The trade-offs get really interesting between that new work and continuing to support the work we’ve already done.
“To do something truly innovative, we need to question everything, not just settle for the status quo.”
There are some interesting technical challenges, too. Our customers store information in dozens of different systems, and we have to figure out how to normalize and represent that data in a single platform. And because we’re essentially creating a new market, we’re also thinking about how to represent our own technology. We’re deciding what to use in terms of data models and terminology so we can make Everbridge easy to understand for our customers — and scalable, as well.
Tell us about your work promoting diversity at Everbridge.
I’m one of the leaders of our Women’s Leadership Group, which focuses on closing the gender gap by attracting, retaining, and promoting women within Everbridge and in tech in general. We have two committees: “Develop” is focused on giving current female employees opportunities to grow personally and professionally. I lead the “Attract” committee, which works on improving the diversity of our candidate pool.
It’s an issue that matters to me personally, but it’s also what’s best for the company — there’s plenty of evidence that diversity, whether in terms of gender or in general, makes teams stronger. To do something truly innovative, we need to question everything, not just settle for the status quo. So we need the people asking those questions to have lots of different perspectives.
Interested in working with Jennifer and the rest of #TeamEverbridge? Check out open positions here.
