Ethan Luke Stenis, Senior Product Manager of Data, shares his experience at Pura, home of the smart fragrance diffuser.
Anna: Tell me about your role at Pura.
Ethan: I’m a Data Product Manager. I joined Pura to create a data strategy and architecture to leverage our data in a smart way. We have both hardware and a software product that provides both the physical experience of a wall device that has fragrance and controlling your device through your mobile phone to then actually smell the fragrance. [Smell] is really part of people's lifestyle. Humans experience the world in five different ways and smell is 20% of that experience. It’s really cool that Pura is making a big impact on people’s lives by making it smell good.
Anna: What is it about IoT that you enjoy?
Ethan: I think we're headed into a very digitally connected world. For the rest of my life, we're going to be constantly connecting to more and more things through the Internet of things. Hopefully I’ll have a house where I can walk in and touch the panel and control everything from temperature to lights, to lighting to heating tiles, and starting dinner. The intersection of technology with the human experience is what's great about working on IoT.
Anna: If you’re successful at Pura, how will you impact the world?
Ethan: I touched on it earlier, but 20% of our experience of being alive is through the sense of smell. The fragrance industry is hundreds, if not thousands of years old. Throughout history, fragrance has been an important part of history and the human experience. Pura provides people with the ability to change scent in each moment in life. If there's a scent that reminds me of your grandparents, you can put that on and it can invoke nostalgia and memories. The sky's the limit with what we can do at Pura - we're just really cracking the surface.
Anna: What drives your product development process as a Product Manager?
Ethan: I've always strived to have, human-centric design where you really want to make sure the customers are at the core of what you're designing and working on. I'm always trying to make sure the customer, the company, the team are always what's driving the product vision and strategy.
Anna: If you were to offer advice to an aspiring product leader, what would it be?
Ethan: I think I would just say that there are so many pathways to getting into product and having the opportunity to kind of impact end users' experiences. Don’t let not having the perfect background bog you down. Product is a confluence of skill sets. Figure out your pathway into it and how to tell your story. You need to be a little bit of a salesperson, a little bit of a project manager, and a little bit of a team leader. That's like a three legged stool. If you have those strong legs underneath you'll do just fine.
