What it means to build product where billing has to be correct

If you had told me a few years ago that I would end up building products in the billing space, I probably would not have believed you. (Me, a fin-tech bro?! Please.) But since joining Orb, it turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve made. Usage-based pricing was still early, still changing, and important enough that the people building it could help shape the next generation of technology products.

In more mature categories, the market is well defined and the shape of the problems is already well established. Orb felt different. And as more companies are being forced to think carefully about usage, monetization, and unit economics, that makes this work feel exciting, concrete, and deeply relevant.

When every product decision touches revenue and trust

The simplest way I can explain PM at Orb is that the stakes shape the job.

One of our biggest mottos is: billing must be correct. When something breaks, you're dealing with a workflow touching revenue, trust, and all the systems at the heart of a business. The escalation has and does hit beyond teams right at the CEO-level.

That level of consequence shapes how I think about product. It pushes you to be more rigorous, more precise, and more serious about the quality of your judgment. Moreover, a lot of my work is focused on finance and accounting teams, which means the product cannot rely on vague promises or loose thinking. These are teams with real process, real constraints, and a high bar for correctness.

Billing must be correct. That idea sounds simple, but it has a lot baked into it. It affects how carefully we make decisions, how deeply we understand the domain, and how seriously we take the details.

How we build at Orb

When I view the product team's role at Orb, it sits cross-functionally with engineering and design: Product owns the why. Design owns the what. Engineering owns the how.

Owning the why means being responsible for the reasoning behind what we do. If we are going to spend time building something, I need to be able to explain why it matters, why it matters now, and why it is the right tradeoff relative to everything else we could be doing.

I like this model because it makes collaboration cleaner. It gives each function real ownership without making anyone work in isolation. Product brings rationale and context. Design gives shape to the solution. Engineering makes it real in a way that is reliable and durable. When that works well, the result is better than any one function could produce alone.

Being a PM is about building strong judgment, then using that judgment well cross-functionally.

When product judgement begins with the customer

You cannot own the why if you are detached from the inputs that make a good “why” possible.

The biggest input is customer contact. I'm lucky to spend time with customers often, both before and after the sale, and that is one of the parts of the job I value most. Sitting with the actual constraints and letting that formulate our thinking with customers is the most useful and rewarding experience.

The second input is domain depth. Finance is not a space where you can get away with shallow understanding. Different customers have different needs depending on their stage, their controls, and the type of business they are running. If I want to make responsible product decisions, I need to stay close to the requirements, the standards, and the realities that shape those decisions.

Run with it and mean it

The collaboration style on my team is best described as high trust and high expectation. The trust is real, but it is earned. People get autonomy because they have put in the work to understand the customer, the details, and the broader context around what the team is trying to move forward.

This is one of the places where Orb’s company value, "Run with it", feels very concrete to me. It shows up in how people operate. There is real ownership here. There is real follow-through. There is also a real expectation that if you are going to run with something, you understand it well enough to carry it responsibly.

That is part of why the environment works well for PMs. You are trusted to think, form opinions, and move fast.

If it hurts, it’s probably right

One thing Orb has taught me very clearly is that good product strategy is not about doing everything.

There is always demand, customer needs, or another thing that would be useful to fix, improve, or polish – especially in Orb’s case, where we’re building business critical infrastructure in the critical path of today’s generation defining companies. I feel that pull too, especially because customer reactions can be incredibly gratifying in the moment. But if you spend all your energy chasing the small things, you can risk missing the bigger opportunities that actually move the needle.

That discipline matters a lot here. I practice choosing carefully, focusing hard, and staying honest about what deserves concentrated effort. It also asks you to invest in the systems that make better execution possible, whether that is documentation, playbooks, analytics, or simply taking the extra time to get something right.

A place for explorers to thrive

The people I think will be most excited by product work at Orb are the ones who are energized by discovery.

A lot of this work is greenfield and still taking shape. It’s uncharted territory and not every answer has already been decided. The job is to help figure out what the right answer should be, execute on that decision, and bring other folks along for the ride.

That is what drew me in, and it is still what keeps me here. I wanted to work on a problem that felt early and important. I wanted to build alongside people with clear ownership. I wanted the chance to make decisions that actually mattered. Orb has been that kind of place for me.

If you are a PM who wants to work closely with customers, build strong judgment, and operate in a role where the why genuinely matters, Orb is a very compelling place to do that.

This will be an exciting ride with high stakes and the responsibility with that will hone you and sharpen you into a strong product person.

If that sounds like a fit for you, check out our careers page to learn more.