The team at Conserv is growing! This week we are introducing: Dave Masom. He is our new Chief Product Officer. Before joining Conserv, Dave worked for seven years at Pack Health, where he oversaw Product Management, Product Design, and Analytics as VP of Product. Dave has also worked as a consultant in the social enterprise sector and started his career at Deloitte.
Dave Masom, Chief Product Officer
What is your role on the Conserv team?
As Chief Product Officer, my role is to make sure we are spending our product team’s time on things that create the greatest value for our users. This sounds simple, but the reality is that there are always far more things we’d like to build than we have time for, so we need to be smart about where we spend that time. That means doing research to figure out what customer needs we are well placed to address and where current solutions don’t do a good job. It also means figuring out what we are good at and seeing where those two things intersect.
How do you see the work you did at Pack Health informing your vision for Conserv?
Pack Health’s product is digital health coaching for people with chronic conditions. In essence, it is a product to help people achieve their long-term health goals through sustainable daily changes in their habits. When it comes to health, the ‘bad’ stuff is satisfying in the short term (choosing the burger and fries, opting for bingeing your favorite show) whereas the ‘good’ stuff typically takes a while to feel good (choosing the salad, opting to exercise).
It’s not a perfect analogy, but I think Conserv is also helping customers achieve their long-term goals in the face of the short term. Preventive conservation is about setting up a system that enables you to monitor your environment and take proactive action to protect your collection in that environment. It might take some work upfront, but it’s more sustainable in the long term and much better than having to fix things after something has gone wrong.
In short, Pack Health is about promoting the health of people. Conserv is about promoting the health of the world’s priceless objects.
What motivated you to join Conserv?
I love the fact that Conserv is so focused on its customers. You can really feel the team’s passion for conservation when talking with them. That’s infectious.
I am a firm believer that if you focus on solving a big problem for a customer and do it really well, then everything else will fall into place. I think Conserv is at the stage where it has identified that big problem and a great way to solve it, and I’m excited to play a part in taking that foundation and building from it.
What changes and developments do you foresee in Conserv’s sensors and software?
In the near term, we want to continue to make preventive conservation accessible to as many institutions as possible. That means investing in making our platform a delight to use – intuitive and simple.
For customers using our sensors, we’re improving the way we alert you when there’s an issue with your environment, so you can take full advantage of the real-time nature of our platform.
We also want to give our users a full picture of their environment. We started down this path when we introduced our IPM functionality, and we want to continue to enhance it.
A collection’s environment is a system: pests thrive in certain environmental conditions, and the presence of certain pests can be an indicator of other problems. Seeing that data together can help conservators draw the right conclusions to take effective action. We want to be a part of making that easy.
We’re going to continue to be guided by our customers’ and users’ feedback. If you have ideas for how we can improve our product to better serve your needs, I would love to hear from you!
If you have any questions about environmental monitoring, integrated pest management, or just want to talk about preventative conservation, please reach out to us! Don’t forget to check out our blog or join our community of collections care professionals where you can discuss hot topics, connect with other conservators or even take a course to get familiar with the Conserv platform.
