by G. Sax, Head of Communications, RESO
This week’s interview is with Janine Sieja, SVP of Product Management at Realtors Property Resource (RPR). We talked about the connection between editorial and product, the great outdoors, and brand names. Enjoy!
Q1: You now have 14+ years at RPR and 16+ years in real estate technology and product development, but you didn’t start your career journey in real estate. How did you land in this sector, and what has contributed to your staying power in this space?
Janine: The beginning of my career was in publishing – magazines and newspapers. I was an editor because I got the most fulfillment from improving the reporters’ drafts, assembling a publication, and doing it again and again. I loved working in journalism, because every day you came to work you learned something different, and there was a lot of variety.
I worked for the Chicago Tribune covering the arts, working with movie reviewers and things of that nature. I worked in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as a travel editor for Outside magazine. I got a pretty good sampling of things going on in the world.
Jumping a couple of steps forward, what I like about product development and software is the notion of pulling things together into a cohesive whole and building something that has value to customers. Being the person that ties it all together and gets it out the door is a through-line between my role in publishing a newspaper and my role in releasing software.
There are people in software development who don’t really have a true sense of deadline. They are perfectly willing to delay and delay. I’m not going to say that I’m never guilty of that, but with a newspaper, it has to get out the door and delivered. If you have to rush a headline, you rush a headline. There is no other choice.
If anything has given me some measure of success, it’s scope. If the project needs to be complete and needs to get done, I’m a good person to make sure that happens. And, hopefully, there are no hot fixes along the way!
At some point in my journalistic career, I decided that I wanted to understand how business works, so I went back to school to get my MBA. Journalism teaches you how to ask the right questions. An MBA teaches you about cashflow, how to keep a business running, how to invest in it and how to lead people. These are complementary areas without a lot of overlap, so it made me more well-rounded.
Another theme in my career is startups – publishing startups, adventure startups, real estate tech – it’s about building things.
You know, the other reason behind my longevity in my role is specific to RPR: organizational culture.
We’ve created a culture at RPR where people can learn and grow into new roles. Quite a few teammates have been here for a decade or more. In my case, I started out writing release notes, then learned release management, moved to QA, started leading a team and ultimately landed as the head of product development. Other teammates have progressed from member support to QA or from industry relations to product management. I love that about RPR.
Q2: Given that you were the Cofounder and Chief Adventurer of a company called Santa Fe Mountain Adventures and, before that, a managing editor at Outside magazine, it feels safe to guess that you are interested in the outdoors. How has that changed now that your job doesn’t necessarily incorporate the outdoors in your day-to-day work?
Janine: You can maintain an outdoors-oriented lifestyle quite easily in Minnesota, where I now live. I cross-country ski in Theodore Wirth Park in Minneapolis, which has 14 miles of groomed trails. I’m an avid runner, skier, cyclist, hiker and more. I like to do all of it outside, and I have maintained that interest even though I don’t work in that world anymore.
Minneapolis is obviously different from Santa Fe, where I would go skiing at Taos every weekend, but I still find opportunities to challenge myself. I’ll give you a funny example.
When I turned 50, I decided to sign up for a 50-mile race in Wisconsin. The race turned out to be the weekend before Midyear [REALTORS® Legislative Meetings] in Washington, DC, and I had to do a live demo that year for the MLS Forum.
The race was fine, but I could not walk very well in DC, and I was concerned about walking on stage in professional attire. I was like, “What if I fall?” But the other half of me said, “Girl, you just ran 50 miles. You can do a 5-minute demo!”
I do try to keep both of those parts of me alive – the professional indoor world and the outdoor adventures. I like to keep that balance. It’s not as disconnected as it could be. I get to work from home near a world-class cross-country ski area, there are plenty of bike trails, there are a multitude of lakes to run around and there is plenty of land to hike.
Q3: I feel comfortable asking you this, because of your editorial and product background. Why does RPR not use the ALL CAPS REALTOR® mark that the National Association of REALTORS® requests to be used throughout the industry? RPR has almost made a point of going against the parental NAR standard that others follow, including us at RESO.
Janine: It’s so fascinating that this comes up. It goes back to the beginning of RPR, which, as I think everyone knows, is a wholly owned subsidiary of NAR.
I think that the name was created in lowercase “Realtor” for better readability, which does sometimes have the effect of looking and being different from how NAR uses the mark.
Of course, I do try to correctly use “REALTOR®” outside of our name. It’s such an interesting thing that Kleenex, Xerox and REALTOR® – these brand names for tissue paper, copy machines and members of NAR – have these special meanings beyond what the person on the street thinks that they mean.
What bugs me is the pronunciation of “real-it-tore” vs. “REAL-tore.” I don’t understand why people say it differently from how it’s spelled.
Maybe RPR uses “Realtor” as just a little way to set ourselves apart from the mothership. We’re the REALTOR® brand, but we’re also the “Property Resource.” We believe that we’re the best member asset of NAR, and we have been able to do things our own way, which goes back to having a brilliant organizational culture.
Three Questions is an interview series that features real estate industry professionals, their businesses and how they interact with real estate standards in a fun way.
