Based in Plano, TX
Sam McBroom
Product Manager with 5 years of experience driving the growth and success of SaaS and data products.
I have a deep appreciation for well-designed products that solve users' needs in a graceful way.
My goal is always to offer a world class product that is years ahead of its competition.
Proven track record in strategic planning, cross-functional work, and leveraging analytics to enhance product functionality and user experience.
About
Product management is my primary outlet for generating impact in the world.
The aspects that initially drew me to product were UX and product strategy. As I gained experience in different industries and stages of the product life cycle, I built my skills in, and appreciation for, the numerous elements of managing products.
What I believe sets me apart most is my persistence in solving problems and my ability to influence change. You will see in my experience how these have benefitted the organizations I have been a part of.
Outside of work, I enjoy going camping, tinkering with electronics, playing piano or trombone, analyzing weather events, and talking to people around the world through ham radio.
Projects
SevereAware
Conversational AI tool delivering highly local severe weather info from advanced weather sources
Powered by highly detailed weather data from diverse sources. Normally, getting this level of quality requires manually sifting through pages of severe weather outlooks, mesoscale analyses, and forecast models. SevereAware does this for you and can put it into the context of your specific questions or needs.
Purpose:
To practice implementing a customized LLM that utilizes dynamic data sources.
Using v0, I prototyped a UI to get chat functionality working. I then moved it to a local Node.js environment and, with the help of Cursor, began incorporating weather data sources and geocoding. Since this is based on location, I used Weather Outlook API to pull the risk data from the SPC outlooks. For current conditions, forecasts, and alerts, I brought in WeatherAPI. Geocoding uses a simple JSON file containing US zip codes and their coordinates.
The most important piece was the SPC outlook discussions and mesoscale analyses. These are the latest expert analyses from an official source, but are quite challenging for a non-weather person to interpret. They include terminology and time zones that don't really make it easy to know what's going on. This is the perfect task for an LLM.
The model of choice for this project was GPT-4o-mini for its speed and cost-effectiveness. A full model isn't necessary here because we're aiming to empower a model with broad knowledge to become a model with deep, topic-specific knowledge.
Once a user enters their zip code, SevereAware retrieves data from its cache if available, then from the external weather sources. It then converts the data to be readable and sends it in a system message to the chat API along with instructions on its purpose and how it should respond.
Experience
Crain Communications
Product Manager
Jul 2022 - Nov 2024
Managed a portfolio of products, each offering industry data to subscribers through a web interface. Collaborated across organizations and disciplines to implement a product management framework and modernize product analytics, resulting in a sustained turnaround in subscriber growth.
Skills I built onto include: strategic planning, stakeholder management, vendor management, negotiations, and advanced product analytics.
CoreLogic
Product Analyst
Jan 2020 - Jul 2022
Oversaw the rollout of a new user interface on a multimillion-dollar SaaS product, coordinated roadmap development across the product org and assembled product/API documentation.
Skills I built onto include: agile, business analysis, navigating matrix organizations, and UI design.
CoreLogic
Product Management Intern
Jun 2019 - Aug 2019
Initiated user insights to guide product strategy, built product mockup resources to streamline prototyping and collaborated with global UX and development teams.
Skills I built onto include: product mockups, data analysis, cross-functional collaboration, and qualitative feedback analysis.
Education
The University of Texas at Dallas
Full-Time MBA
2019
Stephen F. Austin State University
Bachelor of Music
2016
Professional Development
Supervised Machine Learning
DeepLearning.AI
2024
Pragmatic Training
Pragmatic Institute
2021
Agile Development Specialization
University of Virginia, via Coursera
2021
Skills
Organizational Tools:
Technical:
Data Analysis:
Creative: