Meet our Senior Director of Product Management, Jeff Broberg!

As part of our spotlight series highlighting members of the Styra team, we can’t wait for you to meet our Senior Director of Product Management, Jeff Broberg!

My journey has been a long and storied one. If you would like a TL;DR version, below is a roadmap I used when interviewing for Styra to visually show the path I took to get here. 

I went to Worcester Polytechnic Institute for a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering. During my junior year, I took an internship at GE while also working at a restaurant to help pay for my tuition. I would spend my senior year taking graduate courses at night while working during the day to complete my degree. After completing my degree I was hired by Marcam to consult and build applications, but I realized that I was more of a platform engineer at heart. During this time I married my high school sweetheart, Nancy. We moved to Minnesota when I took a job with IBM to work on the SilverLake project that would become the AS/400 a mid-range environment. While I enjoyed my work, I really didn’t want to live in Minnesota. After a short stint back at Marcam, I moved to Cape Cod to take a position with Software 2000. I built an R&D team that was focused on building a next-generation product based on Smalltalk. Back then, everything was green screen and just starting to move into client-server. We wanted to figure out how to build a platform for HR and Financial products that provided services like security, reporting and authorization could be built on top of. The platform ended up being a success, but I was starting to get an itch to branch out and create my own company. At that time, I was really interested in writing policies and I wanted to find a way to write for non-developers to write policies that could really affect change. The interest was just starting to gain traction and people were trying to build portals that could be customized. I came up with this concept that provided an environment with a Java non-developer-established policy very similar to the IFTT concept we are familiar with today. I created my company, eObject, based on this concept. 

The company was a quick success and was purchased by Silverstream after only a year and a half. I took over Silverstream’s engineering department activities regarding the merging of the technology of eObject into Silverstream.  Silverstream was then acquired by Novell, and while there, I ran their portal efforts for a time before I once again got the itch to start my own company. I ended up starting a company Cape Coders with the aim to provide tech work for people living on the Cape so they wouldn’t have to make the long commute to Boston. Unfortunately, this company would end up failing terribly. Cape Cod is a seasonal community that didn’t really have enough tech base to have a high demand for developers or engineers. I had a staff that could build a company a message bus while companies were looking for people to help them build an Excel spreadsheet. After that, I joined CA Technologies as a member of their advanced technology team to help them understand what identity meant for security. I helped focus and define a cohesive strategy at the time for how all of their products could come together as an IAM solution. I eventually progressed up the ranks to Vice President of Product Management where I oversaw many different product lines and had around 20 Product Managers around the globe reporting to me. After ten years, I was starting to feel a bit long in the tooth and was interested in making the move to a cloud-based company. I was also tired of working as a high-level executive focused on management and wanted to get back to my roots building solutions and finding ways to solve the new authorization problems that were arising. That is the work that I really love. I ended up taking a position at OneLogin as a Senior Director of Product Management. While I was at CA Technologies, I had done a lot of work on creating industry standards working with people from companies such as  Microsoft, Google and Ping to figure out where IAM was going and the best ways to standardize processes around identity. I worked to bring in these new trends and best practices to OneLogin and push them toward the future of Authentication and Authorization. I ended up leaving OneLogin to join a company called SecureAuth which provided a more traditional on-premise access management product. They were fighting against competitors that had much more robust offerings that included identity solutions and data stores. I built them a new identity environment that included a layer for privacy concerns and included data stores. 

About a year and a half ago I got a call from an old colleague from CA Technologies who was now working at Styra. He knew that I had always been interested in Authorization and asked if I wanted to come play. I immediately said yes and made the move to Styra. I plan on having this be my last blast before retirement and so far it’s been a great experience. 

I learned early on that to effect change within an organization, you have to understand things from the business perspective. Product Management is the necessary evil needed to help guide changes by being the in-between engineering and business mindsets. It reminds me a bit of when I worked in a kitchen during college. I started at the bottom, working my way up to chef which gave me a very clear understanding of how each position worked and more importantly worked together. It was where I started to understand the importance of teams and coordination. I loved busy nights where I was able to keep my team coordinated and running smoothly. My current position similarly gives me the opportunity to be a coordinator and champion for my team. It is a challenging position but ultimately a very rewarding one. 

The key is to really understand the strengths and weaknesses of each individual team member and be honest about those strengths/weaknesses. Team members are going to have different interests. They will perform better when they are able to work on what they enjoy and excel at. Understanding each of your team members’ strengths will help guide you to building the strongest team possible. 

To build a strong product management team you can’t have a big ego. You are bringing together a lot of very intelligent and creative people. Ego can’t get in the way of allowing everyone to collaborate and communicate issues freely. Mutual respect and honesty across the entire team will help build a successful team.

You have to trust people and believe that they will be honest with you. It is also important to remember that honesty goes both ways.  I do my best to create an environment based on equality instead of one focused on hierarchies. I always have an open-door policy with my team to help encourage feedback and honest conversations. 

I want to help Styra win in the authorization space. We have a fantastic opportunity with Open Policy Agent and the market. We just need to focus on being able to articulate that opportunity to the market. I am excited to be a part of spreading that message. 

Intense, Innovative, Compassionate. 

I build legos. I love the way you can explain many concepts with legos. Like how authentication and authorization pipelines can be thought of as the assemblage of different lego brick types in different patterns.  Besides that, they are just fun. 

Alice’s Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie

My wife’s lasagna, it’s fantastic. 

My wife is a steller cook so I am mostly retired from cooking. She makes the most delicious  soups. When I cook, shrimp scampi is one of my go-to dishes. 

Family is the most important thing to me. I couldn’t live not being close to my family. Luckily, one daughter lives less than a mile away and my other daughter and son are also close.