Whisker is the maker of Litter-Robot, the self-cleaning litter box for cats. We sat down with Nicholas Munck to talk about his role at Whisker, helping cat lovers to take better care of their furry friends.
Whisker is the maker of Litter-Robot, the self-cleaning litter box for cats. Kraftful Growth Lead, Anna Carmichael, chatted with Whisker PM Nicholas Munck about his role at Whisker, helping cat lovers to take better care of their furry friends.
Anna: Tell me about your role at Whisker.
Nicholas: I lead digital product at Whisker.We’re working on many products right now and have products like self-cleaning litter boxes, and automatic feeders on the market. It's been super fun.
I started off as our first product manager at a small company and have grown the software team to ~40 people. My role has always had the goal of delivering exactly what our users want. But now that we've grown and a team that works toward the delivery of that vision that we have the ability to step back and take the time to truly understand what they want and how to make it happen. Hopefully we can start making really data-driven decisions and evolve our product for our users.
Anna: How did you get into IoT?
Nicholas: I love to build and release real products. I'm excited because I got to step in and actually decide how we're going to build the team. What kind of company are we, what kind of products are we going to release, what is our identity as a digital company? It's all brand new and I've got to be able to take a note of input into what that is like and get to hire our design team we've hired to a specific ideal, like a person, I guess. We're really doing a great jo
Anna: If you’re successful at Whisker, how will you impact the world?
Nicholas: We’re able to analyze how much your cat weighs, how many times your cat eats, and goes to the bathroom, which is data. And all that data will be based on like a five year old female fixed teddy cat living in an apartment in Detroit. And imagine that times millions and millions of cats across the world.
We can compare things in ways that are very new and no one has ever done before. Even the ability to know when cats go to the bathroom, when they eat. There's insights that could be made that just haven't been able to be made before.
Anna: What advice do you have for aspiring product leaders?
Nicholas: The thing that most teams are missing and what any good PM can bring is a vision. The ability to step in and own a product and see that product from the user perspective and then really buy in to what you're trying to deliver.
The PM is the person to keep the train on the tracks, to keep everyone happy, going, to keep the vision clear and to keep things out of the way. It’s a dual sided job. You manage up and down at the same time.
Anna: Is there anything else that you’d like to add?
Nicholas: I've had a lot of fun being a product manager. Throughout the years, I've worked on varying projects from like small internal tools that only use all the way up to [Whisker]. It's a great way to build really cool things without necessarily changing a specific skill set. I've been able to build things for cars, automated apps, and even the kind of jobs that have come my way that I haven't taken have been so varied.
It’s rare to find a company that gives you the trust and the freedom to actually take an idea and make it a reality and bring it to market. But when you do, it’s very enriching and the ability to see a whole team actually find success and be excited that we got something out of the market and it's getting good reviews has a really big impact.
