Architecture, And: Senior Product Manager at Higharc

A Welcome to Practice Disrupted, a podcast where we find ways to create new solutions to current challenges while elevating the value of architects. I'm your host, Evelyn Lee, an architect who spans tech as an angel investor, start up advisor, and founder of Practice of Architecture. Whether you're a seasoned architect or just starting in the field, this Hello, disruptors. Welcome to this week's episode of Practice Disrupted. On today's show, we're bringing on Abe Drexler AIA, a product manager at Hyarch. Another product manager you say? That's right. I realized I had a product manager on in episode 158. But similar to how the work of project architects are different, so goes the way of product managers.

A Abe is a licensed architect with a passion for design and digital technologies. As a product manager at Hyarch, he develops methods for systematizing and automating the design and documentation of homes. Previously, as an architect at Karen Timberlake in Bellinger, he has worked on a variety of project types and scales. Throughout his career, he's focused on expanding the value of architecture and making design more accessible. Hi. Welcome to the show. We're so glad to have you on Practice Disrupted.

B Very excited to be here.

A Yeah. So we like to kick it off with a little bit of an icebreaker. We've obviously just run your formal bio. Is there anything else that you can share with our audience that might either set the stage for today's conversation or just something that might be interesting to know?

B Sure. Yeah. So not formally listed on my bio. I have a particular interest in public interest design or community design. Some of those threads go back to college. I was instructed and was mentored by Brian Bell, the seed network at NC State. He's a professor there now. After graduating, I actually worked on a documentary, produced and filmed the documentary on favelas and barrios in South America with a partner.

B So really studied and and traveled a lot to produce that. My, my first position professional position was an architect at a small firm in Austin, Texas focusing on single family affordable housing, worked on community projects in Philadelphia. So it's a it's a thread that, I'm glad to have kept going throughout my career and really value that that opportunity to bring design and architectural value to folks that might not otherwise be able to receive it.

A No. I didn't know Brian. I don't know if he'd remember me, but I was linked through him through my work at public architecture when I was working at public Yeah. Probably before you were one of his students. So it's interesting then to hear about your your interests in in social design, and public interest design, and how that's kind of evolved, and to learn a little bit more about your career path and how you are, and how you got to be a product manager at Hyatt.

B Yeah. Sure. If we trace trace my path here. So I went to NC State, worked for Internet firms in North Carolina. I was very much interested in public interest design and worked for a small firm, h u n o, in Austin, Texas that the founding principal there had worked for decades in the Austin community, affordable housing, public interest project. So very much enjoyed my time there. But as I was there, I realized I I still had an interest from school carrying over looking at new technologies, tools, and workflows for architectural practice. And I thought that that could be leveraged to help support the types of projects I was interested in.

B So coming with that interest coming into it with that interest, I found a pretty pretty good position at KieranTimberlake that attracted my eye. Had some connections there. My time at KieranTimberlake was primarily, you know, they they do mostly institutional work. My work there was mostly institutional larger projects, but they integrate research into the work. So there's a a separate research group in the firm. They also integrate researchers, people with material science backgrounds, computation, environmental science, they would sit in on project teams. So while you're doing typical architectural task, you would often be sitting next to someone who's perhaps has a a a master's or a more focused scientific degree performing research on the project, and we would be able to collaborate with those researches researchers and carry out research on our own. And I really love that approach.

B There's a strong commitment from the firm to explore new tools, workflows, methodologies. We even had a group near future near future practices looking at what's just just over the horizon, not not necessarily tools and workflows that are, say, decades away, but, like, what's something we could we could lean in on and test and be beta users for and pull into our practice next year. So I I love that aspect of the firm. But as I matured and grew in architectural profession, there is sort of a a clear track for how you might grow in your, your career. So as I was moving into a more leadership role, more management opportunities presented themselves. I I worked as a project architect at Ballenger, which is another it's a medium sized firm in Philadelphia. I was working on a very large hospital complex in a predesigned schematic design phase. For that particular project, there were many calls, coordination calls with consultants, with lawyers, other architecture firms.

B And the I'd say my main role and responsibility was coordination and and organizing consultants, keeping schedules. And I think I think architects are naturally really good at that, but I realized that I still had this inclination to explore tools and workflows. And I was interested in exploring alternative paths to bring architectural value to the table. And and in that process, I started looking at, alternative practices. And and actually that's how, this is a fun fact for the podcast. I listened to this podcast and was introduced to Architeckeys, that Slack group. And that was one of the channels that I used to look for new positions and and just be abreast of changes in the industry, what see what folks are doing. So through that, actually, I was able to connect with High Arc.

B Michael Bergens, our VP of product, has an architectural background. Really was amazed by what they were doing and the way they were approaching the tech side of things. So I was able to join Hyarch as a initially as a designer and then after a short period of time transitioned into a product role as a product manager. So the I should say the subject matter is similar. HyArk is focused on production housing and automating design management of production housing for builders. So there's a lot of subject matter expertise. So I I feel like it's a it's a good thread, a consistent thread.

A It is a consistent thread, but I'm I wonder, and I kinda wanna prod a little bit here. What does that role have to do? Or what's your relationship? Or or how do you maintain that relationship back to public interest design and what you had hoped to do there?

B Yeah. It's it's a good question. I I think the parallel is that public interest design is focused on bringing more value to in my opinion, public interest design is focused on bringing value to clients or parts of the marketplace or industry that aren't otherwise receiving design services. So HyArk focuses on production housing. It's business to business software where primary our primary client is a builder who builds, say, 200 plus homes a year. They're building generally at market rate. Market rate does not afford a 10% design fee. So where most people in the country live in terms of new housing, that population, which is it's a overwhelmingly large percentage of the population, they don't have access to architects.

B They don't have access to design services. So via technology and our ability to scale, we can inject design services and architectural value into every day, the average person's new construction home.

A Right. No. I just wanted to make that connection from where you started to where you are now. So can you go a little bit deeper? So your primary client is is developers. Just give us a little bit more context about the space that Hyreark is operating in, so then we can actually talk about your role within the company?

B Sure. Yeah. So so for context, again, our so our primary client is production builders that typically build 200 plus homes a year. They often will develop and build, the communities themselves. So they'll they'll purchase the land, go through procurement themselves, actually build the homes and then sell the homes to individual clients or future owner occupants.

A Yeah. And then tell us a little bit about the product that support these production builders.

B Sure. So the the Hyre platform is a place where builders can design, manage, and then produce assets for all of their homes and their their various designs. The Hyre platform starts by building a intelligent three-dimensional model, a centralized data model that represents the design. And from that centralized data model, we then are able to generate multiple assets. That includes automated construction drawings. That includes estimation data via our procure system, so takeoffs and material downloads. We are also generating three-dimensional visualizations. So renderings, interior walkthroughs.

B Those are our 3 most typical assets. We also integrate sales experience. So builders can live on their website, walk through the Hyatt platform, ensure their data is all connected and in sync, allowing clients to select individual options or customize their home in a way that they simply couldn't manage before that. Great.

A I just wanted to set the context for the space that you're operating in now. So you started off as a designer. What does that look like, being a designer at a technology firm?

B That's a great question. And I was really an architectural designer when I started. One of our product types, one of our product offerings is an off the shelf house. An off the shelf house that we designed that is highly customizable, pre programmed with many different, as builders would say, structural options, meaning an option that fundamentally changes the layout or or adds physical space. It's it's not simply a a small dishwasher for a large dishwasher or appliances, but a significant option. Those those types of changes are very difficult for traditional software platforms to manage. So my my role was to design a home that could do everything that could contain any option configuration, a wide array, literally millions of permutations were were available with this home in a box. In in designing this this magic home that does everything, I quickly became an expert user of the system, was able to work through the settings with all the parameters and the various facets of modeling and organizing.

B So so in that way, I quickly became an expert user and was able to start suggesting product improvements, noting bugs, reviewing feature requests. So it was a somewhat easy or or smooth transition into a product role. And I and I actually think architects and my background makes me really well suited to be a product manager, especially at a at a company like Hyrek where the subject matter is something I'm very familiar with.

A Right. So what's interesting is I I've set this up to be a conversation of with 2 different product managers back to back, because I think what product managers do even on the technical side of things is very different depending upon the company. So within HyArk, what is your role of a product manager?

B Yeah. So at HyArk, I'm a product manager for the building model and and studio environment. The the studio environment for for our system is the authoring interface and platform. It's the app in which you design a central data model or design, build your home, and program in options. So my day to day is often talking to users or external clients that we have, reviewing their needs, trying to understand their pain points in using the software, or understand something that they're trying to get out of the software, especially in terms of construction drawings of that that particular asset. I often spend a lot of my time working directly with our engineering team, reviewing requirements, or developing requirements, which are in in Arca speak, it's, it's like drawing specifications to be built by the engineering team. They execute on the requirements. So, again, like architectural practice, we'd sketch through ideas, collaborate with other product managers, and come up with the best path forward, and then review with engineering to execute.

B And then last, there's a lot of time spent, even day to day on presenting, communicating what's been complete, what's on the road map. We very often talk about what our plans are for the next 6 months or review a recently released feature with an ex existing client and talk through that process, what they can get out of the software, seek feedback, and it and it turns into a a cycle. Right? You're you're back to the beginning asking for more feedback.

A Right. And when you talk about working with engineers, these are people that have kind of a depth and an expertise in coding. Being a product manager, what have you found that relationships to be like? And how much expertise actually do you need to have in in coding to be able to work with them?

B My coding knowledge is fairly limited. My technical knowledge is fairly limited. I'm pretty interested in visual scripting and Dynamo and Grasshopper and have played around with Python scripting, that sort of thing. But but, really, that has not helped me very much at all in my current role. Not to say that it wouldn't help if I if I learned more, but it's not really a a hard requirement for me. Our engineering team also on the other end, a lot of them have architectural backgrounds. Either they went to undergrad for architecture or they even worked at a firm for some time. But in that way, it makes the translation easier because they know what a a top plate might be or window transom, rough openings.

B We we have these terms that we throw out as architects that we expect the world to know, and they don't always. So a big part of my job is confirming the exact intent of those phrases in the meeting and then ensuring that the three-dimensional geometry actually matches the the tectonics of what's going to be constructed.

A What similarities then would you create between your last role in architecture where you're managing a big institutional project versus what you do now as a product manager in tech?

B Yeah. So I I think as a project architect, you are often synthesizing from multiple stakeholders. You're often bombarded from various sides of a project, people with different outcomes and desires for physical space. Your job is to pull all that information together and select or synthesize that information and come up with a a holistic design that best resolves everyone's needs. Product management is very similar to that. I'm often communicating with multiple stakeholders, multiple clients or exterior customers, interior stakeholders, the engineering on the technical and feasibility side. And then the main impetus of, of product documentation is to come up with, again, a a synthesized solution that everyone can get behind and resolves the the most immediate or severe problems and positions the product in a way that we can grow, I should say. We're often working incrementally and planning our next steps even as we execute on on phase 1 for things.

B So that I I think in the soft skills there in order, there's a lot of shared soft skills between project architecture and product management and synthesizing various inputs. And also just communication, clear communication, the ability to visually represent ideas and present that to folks goes a really long way. I think architects are really well suited for that.

A How about where do they differ? Where do you feel like you needed to go out and gain additional experience to bridge any gap that you saw or that you just wanted to gain more experience in as you stepped into the role product manager?

B In terms of how they're different, I would say this this may be obvious, but architecture is such a a physical domain. You're you're it's very tactile. Right? You're ordering brick samples, and I I always enjoyed the CA aspect of project architecture, being on the field, talking to folks as they're customizing the detail. And there's a certain, yeah, tactility to that where you can physically touch what you're going to build and it'll you can walk through it when you're done at the end of the day. And that's not necessarily the case for software, of course. I I do think you can still craft a beautiful document or presentation, craft a message in the way that you might craft an architectural detail. So there are still there's similarities there. But, yeah, that that physical versus digital divide is probably the largest difference in my mind.

A Besides kind of that physical aspect, is there anything that you miss about stepping out of a more traditional role in practice?

B Yeah. I I should say when I when I joined High Arc, there was I did have some hesitation, you know, sort of making a leap of faith, jumping from traditional practice, which has a pretty clearly defined career trajectory and path, and a sense of next steps or advancement in a firm. So joining a tech company and a start up, a lot of that's pretty unknown. I actually like that freedom and flexibility where I think I think folks at High Arc, especially in my experience, have the ability to craft their own trajectory or or their own interest. And and that way, you can kinda make of it what you want. In terms of what I miss, I I would say I I maybe I miss the familiarity, but in other ways, I appreciate the flexibility that I have today. There was a there's a learning curve for that, but it's a a positive one.

A I wanna lean into kind of the flexibility because a lot of people that talk to me or reach out to me about moving into tech, I was talking about the flexibility and hours, difference in pay benefits, etcetera. Is that something that you've seen in your move over from traditional practice to tech?

B Yeah. I I think traditional practice is, I think it's pretty well known that in terms of hours work or flexibility, even just just base salary, it's pretty well established numbers and documentation there that make it pretty obvious that traditional practice is suffering in that way. And I you know, again, I think this goes back to my point earlier. Architects should be exploring alternative business models. As much as I enjoyed exploring alternative practice models, I should say, tools, technology for design, I I think this is a way of exploring an alternative business approach. Software as a service, a venture capital backed firm, it's a it's a different business model, but it's that same spirit of innovation and exploration. So in that regard, it seems aligned to some of the work that I was carrying out at at KiranTimberlake even. In terms of flexibility, that's a good point.

B Hyarch is a remote first organization. We're well staffed with with senior folks with a lot of established domain experience. I I think in architecture, there's a clear understanding of what you're trying to build and what the client wants at the end of the day. It's very obvious that if a client wants a hospital, chances are they're gonna expect a hospital 4 years later. But in tech, there's a whole lot more exploration because you're not really sure what the final solution is going to be when you start off. You have to have the conversations, and you could build something wildly different depending on how the those initial conversations go. How that affects me as a product manager, I really get to decide what I think is the most important thing to work on almost every day. And and, certainly, my my prioritization list comes from collaboration with product managers, my my manager, VP of product, and and head of product and CEO VP level folks at the company.

B But but generally speaking, the day to day is something that I get to determine. I I appreciate that flexibility. It it is harder to get used to when coming from a a more structured or dogmatic architectural model, but I think it can be really rewarding.

A Talk about, you know, so many leaders in architecture practice, and I've talked to some friends in large firms who are, you know, there's this call back to the office because they believe that's where you build culture, that's how you innovate, the ability to pull someone off and over to your desk and kind of sketch out something new. So how does that innovation work and that that culture building work in an environment like HyArRC, who is remote first?

B Yeah. So we collaborate, I would say, as much, if not more than folks in the office, at least in my experience. I've been in offices where all 130 architecture staff were in physically the same room. And I don't think removing the walls is necessarily going to it's not gonna make employees collaborate. Right? There there has to be a a cultural spirit of collaboration that has to be something valued culturally in the firm. So, you know, physical space and walls are important, but I don't think it dictates your ability or inability to collaborate necessarily. We use all sorts of tools, Figma, Mural like Canvas things to quickly sketch out ideas. Folks have iPads and pens and can literally sketch out an idea, take a screenshot, and send it over, 3000 miles.

B I think folks tend to compare work from home and work in the office like it's apples to apples. And I think there are there are pros and cons in both, and they don't necessarily they're they're not counter to one another in some ways. I I think that there are certainly benefits of working in the office, and I don't think that all of those benefits are matched by work from home. But there are also benefits from work from home that you just don't you can't touch if you're having to go to the office every day. For example, I live in the Panhandle of West Virginia, which is, like, an hour and a half from Washington, DC, which is DC would be the next most reliable place for me to work as a project architect at the scale of institutional work that I've done for most of my career. And that again, talking about flexibility, my children are able to be close to their family, grandparents, and that type of flexibility and freedom just isn't possible all the time when you're when you're working in person. I could go into more about the the collaboration side because I do think we with sketching and and various mural apps, we we make that pretty fluid. We we do some Hyatt does some travel.

B We we have 3 a year annual retreats for the whole company to get together, and that's mostly for social bonding. We do some we do some work, some serious work, but a lot of it is just being around your coworkers, building camaraderie. So there's there's organized time and space for that, and I think that's that's pretty important for a remote culture to to maintain. Without that, I think, you know, there'd be something lacking that, you know, thankfully, I'm not feeling at the moment.

A So one of the questions that I always get asked is, you know, why did you, why did you leave architecture? Where do you consider yourself in the spectrum of still being a part of the profession, at least working as a product manager in a space that is still AEC related, versus not a part of traditional practice?

B Yeah. I I feel that I am still part of a architectural discourse in a way and part of that conversation. I feel that if we can make the production homes of the of the country 5% better, 3% better, at that scale, the level of impact is pretty tremendous. Alternatively, as a practicing architect, I could design a magazine worthy project that gets discussed and is exemplary. And I think that also has a tremendous impact, but in a different way. So I feel that I'm I'm, I'm still working in architectural practice, still working to make a built environment better. I'm just doing a very small amount for many, many homes at one time.

A At the time of this recording, there's a lot of graduations happening right now. I feel like there are a lot more students that are intrigued by alternative career paths. So what would you say to those young architects that are new graduates or just, you know, starting out in their careers about finding alternative career paths and and even looking outside of traditional practice?

B My advice for young architects, folks interested in alternative practices is just to keep exploring, ask questions, reach out to folks. I've tried to, have an open door. This is I should say this isn't necessarily an invitation for a million LinkedIn requests, but I try to respond to to folks that are just interested in what does product management mean. I have an architectural background to How did you get there? What's it been like? So I think I think there's a lot of curiosity out there, but folks don't really know how to get started. And my best advice is just to keep keep researching and listening and seeing what's out there. I mentioned the Architeckeys Slack group. Out of architecture also is a great community and has a lot of resources, and and you can find various fields or opportunities that that are existing out there. So I would say don't don't shut it out.

B There's a certain culture in architecture school and profession of 4 years and then 2 or 5 years as I did. You take 6 tests. You intern for 3 years, then you get licensed, and then you become principal, and then maybe become partner. And there's just this track that you're on, and it's scary to think about jumping off that track. And in reality, I think folks can do whatever they want. Like, life is a lot more flexible than you might initially think if you have that mindset. So there's there's no no harm in exploring and researching. And if you're interested in alternative practices and different business models, I think there's a lot of opportunity to change the architecture industry.

B And there's a lot of, a lot of value that we can bring outside the the traditional delivery methods.

A Absolutely. Another question I had for you was along those lines, how do you think tech and even alternative approaches to practice or how we how we bring buildings to life, really shaped the way the future of the the built environment looks with our fingerprints as architects of them?

B Yeah. I, you know, I think I have a sort of mantra of automate the dumb stuff in terms of latest technology developments. We don't necessarily want to use the latest technology to design and come up with bespoke wonderful moments in an architectural project, but we do want to use technology to do the things that we don't enjoy doing. Right? I think that's uncontroversial. Folks don't necessarily want to lay out bathrooms for hours or dimension of floor plan late to the night, and they don't have to. So I think the advent of technology, of AI or or traditional algorithms and coding really should allow designers to focus on design and focus on humans at the other end who are going to be occupying the building. Spend more time talking to folks before the design starts. Do more post occupancy evaluations.

B There's all sorts of ways we can leverage technology to do our existing jobs better and more efficiently, but I don't think it necessarily needs to replace us or fundamentally change the ultimate designs that we're providing.

A Yes. I absolutely agree with with all of that that you just said. I see technology as an as an amplifier, right, and an ability for us to do more of what we personally like to do, but also where, where our skills are most most valued. I've been talking to a few firms about where they spend a lot of their hours. You talked earlier at the top of the podcast about, you know, the 10% fee associated with kind of the the cost of design or hiring an architect within the scope of a larger project. And if you look at where you spend the majority of those 10% fee, that 10% fee where a lot of your hour your actual hours of work are going to right now is in construction documents. And there's an argument right to be said that the value that we actually bring to a project is more so in the DD and SD phase or SDDD phase. And we don't actually get to spend that much time there since we do spend so much time in construction documentation.

A What do you think the career paths look like for architects in the future? Or where would you hope it would go and continue to evolve?

B I think one reason why I leaped to tech was because I did not see a really clear line I didn't have a really clear line of sight on a a tech oriented or tool oriented position in a traditional practice. So I think there's a lot of opportunity for specialization within Affirm that would allow users to come up with their their own tools or explore workflows instead of just accepting the status quo. So, yeah, I I think in terms of architectural practice and the types of roles that that I would hope would be created, I would love to see more firms that really focus on workflows and tools and near future practices in that way.

A Do you see a future where more architects are working in companies like Hyarch and kind of the the diminishing of the traditional practice, or are you hopeful that traditional practice kind of finds its own place in the future going forward, maybe in a not so traditional way?

B I think there's an opportunity for expansion of architecture and the rules that are available when it comes to a firm like HyArk. Again, we are we're focused on an underserved population where architects are not currently practicing. So there's actually a large piece of the pie that the architects are not focused on. So there's there's actually more space available here. We're not we're not actually constraining or limiting architects, in my opinion. Now I mentioned that I started off at Hyarch as a designer. We find we feel at Hyarch that there's an opportunity for designers to work with our system to develop template homes. You can design a template of rules and relationships and configurations.

B And then from that, a client can become they can have a seat at the table and actually design the final touches, make the final decisions themselves. And in a lot of ways, by establishing these rules and templates, you're inviting like, as I mentioned, you're inviting the client to come be part of the design process. So in some ways, it it works better from that end too because they're they're empowered. They're able to participate. They have ownership. Speaking of threads, I mean, this this is, these are rules that I learned lessons I learned in South America looking at favelas. When folks have the ability to take ownership, design their own space, they're they're more empowered. They they feel like it is their home.

B Right? It's not just something off the shelf. I think there's a lot of opportunity to expand architectural practice by using technology, and we can start to explore different business opportunities and and methods of of generating value.

A If you were to leave with a challenge for the future of the profession, for the future leaders within the industry, what would it be?

B My challenge is, how can we reshape the architectural profession to be more inclusive, to go after a bigger piece of the pie in terms of in terms of where people are living. Right? Bring more participants to the table. Bring more owners into the design process. We don't we don't need to tuck it away. It's a special thing called design that we're gonna take back to our our room. We're gonna come up with this perfect idea that you're gonna love, and then we'll present it to you. Right? Like, we know that doesn't work. We know we wanna be more inclusive, and I think there's a lot of opportunities with technology to do that.

A Hi, disruptors. Thank you for joining us today on an episode of Practice Disrupted. If you like the content for today's show, you can find all of our past episodes over on practice of architecture.com/podcast. Be a part of the conversation by joining me, our speakers, and other disruptors in our community at practice of architecture.com/community. Our social media handle is practice of arch. That's practice of a r c h. We'd love to hear from you, so feel free to drop us a DM and say hello. Tune in next week for a new conversation on change in the profession.