Meet Seb!
Seb is a Research Product Manager here at ADInstruments.
Seb has been with ADInstruments for 13 years. As a Research Product Manager, Seb interfaces with a lot of different parts of the business in order to identify, design, produce, and test new products for customers.
“I work with our end customers in a lot of different capacities… it’s really my job to get the voice of the customer into the hardware development team, and to make sure that we’re making the most relevant and best products that we can for our customers.”
Like many long-term ADI staff, Seb started in one area and then moved around until he found the right role to fit his interests. “I originally started in Sales,” Seb says, “It was a good experience coming into the industry, but I did realize relatively quickly that I’m not really a born salesman. I was much more drawn to the technical side of things.”
Moving from sales to technical support was good, but the shift into his current Research Product Manager role seems to be a perfect fit. “When the research product manager job became available, I grabbed it,” Seb says, “I like being more deeply involved in the product, understanding how it all works, and being involved in the development process.”
“It was really nice to be able to get that experience coming out of uni and going into a customer-facing role, learning those customer service skills that I didn’t get at uni, and then coming back to the technical engineering side of things; I think it helps to have had that experience so that we can really understand what problem we’re trying to solve from a customer perspective.”
When it came time to develop a new PowerLab line, the PowerLab C and C Series, Seb was part of keeping the customer at the forefront of development decisions. “Our existing products have a very strong reputation for being reliable, and we know that’s what our customers expect,” Seb says, “there’s no point in building some new cool feature or product if it’s not reliable or your customers can’t trust it, so we had that in mind through designing the electronics, the enclosures, the software, firmware, everything we did we had that in the backs of our minds.”
“The most satisfying part of my job is probably at the end of a project when you get to see that product actually in the hands of someone who is able to do something cool with it,” Seb says, “I enjoy all of the phases of development, but to be able to follow through from the beginning of the concept of the product and the idea of what problem we’re trying to solve, all the way through to design and construction and testing, and then having it actually out in the market being used by people all around the world… it’s really great.”
