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Over the last couple of years, the pace of enterprises looking to enter the smart and connected device market has accelerated. Ranging verticals from HVAC to home appliances to security systems, OEMs are building and launching IoT-enabled versions of their unconnected counterparts. While selling and marketing to consumers is not new to these companies, meeting consumer expectations of smart-home enabled devices in a crowded space presents a set of new and unfamiliar challenges.

One of the sought-after inputs into a well-functioning smart home is presence detection of people (and pets). Presence or absence of occupants is an important input for triggering (or not trigger) an automation. These occupancy-triggered automations save energy when they turn off lights and keep HVAC idle while everyone is away. They also kick off things that are better done while no one is around such as robot vacuum runs.

The day-to-day of a product manager varies from role to role. One of the contributing factors that often shapes the responsibilities of a product manager is the maturity and size of the company. While there are plenty of examples of early stage companies or established enterprises that don’t follow the trend, from my experiences the following is a good rule of thumb of some differences in the field of product management across the two types of companies.