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Mike Flouton

AMA: Barracuda VP, Product Management, Mike Flouton on Product Development Process

October 4 @ 10:00AM PT

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  1. What role do engineers have in planning which features you build in the sprint? How do I get buy-in without giving them control?

    Mike Flouton
    Mike Flouton

    Boxford Capital Managing Partner | Formerly Barracuda, SilverSky, Digital Guardian, OpenPages, Cybertrust • 3y

    I’m a huge believer in transparency. Make your roadmap and decision process transparent. We use a weighted scoring algorithm where roadmap items (and ultimately supporting tickets) roll up into a prioritization rubrik. That prioritization methodology should be available to anyone in your company, including engineers. Make grooming a collaborative activity - let them weigh in on the scores you are giving to specific tickets. Argue with fact, not opinion. If you’re doing your job you will have the ...Read More

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  2. When facing constrains from finance/budget, how do you balance product delivery/growth and lack of resource

    Mike Flouton
    Mike Flouton

    Boxford Capital Managing Partner | Formerly Barracuda, SilverSky, Digital Guardian, OpenPages, Cybertrust • 3y

    The biggest mistake companies make is treating product management a junior, technical function. A good PM is a strategic thinker who is market oriented. A big part in making that transition to the strategic is learning to speak in terms of business outcomes, and learning how to sell internally. If you’re not getting the resources you need, put together a model for the business benefit you could drive with more resources. Don’t talk about story points, or feature velocity, or any of that. Executi ...Read More

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  3. How do you balance “shipping on time” with ensuring you have the right market insights to prioritize the roadmap correctly? We do 2 week sprints.

    Mike Flouton
    Mike Flouton

    Boxford Capital Managing Partner | Formerly Barracuda, SilverSky, Digital Guardian, OpenPages, Cybertrust • 3y

    Job number one is ensuring you have the right market insights to prioritize the roadmap correctly. Engineering managers and scrum masters can pick up the slack and keep the trains running on time when you’re falling behind on customer research. Never shortchange market insights!

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  4. How do you prevent rogue engineers from slipping in features that are good but not prioritized?

    Mike Flouton
    Mike Flouton

    Boxford Capital Managing Partner | Formerly Barracuda, SilverSky, Digital Guardian, OpenPages, Cybertrust • 3y

    This is a classic conundrum. The good news is it’s a lot less costly when it happens in today’s agile world than it was when I started my PM career in the days of 18 month waterfall development cycles. First, apply your PM skills and dig in and explore the problem and its root causes. Is this an isolated issue specific to a single engineer, or more of a systemic cultural issue? If it’s the former, the fix is a bit easier. Make sure you have a rock solid relationship with your engineering manager ...Read More

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  5. At what point do you talk about success metrics with your development team?

    Mike Flouton
    Mike Flouton

    Boxford Capital Managing Partner | Formerly Barracuda, SilverSky, Digital Guardian, OpenPages, Cybertrust • 3y

    Metrics work best when they are continuously embedded into the process. We use OKRs, and cascade them down from top level corporate goals into product line metrics, product team metrics and sprint metrics. Use them in a regular cadence to assess progress towards high level strategic objectives. We continually refer to them, in quarterly business reviews, sprint retrospectives, grooming and planning.

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  6. Who is involved in assessing the problems you choose to tackle?

    Mike Flouton
    Mike Flouton

    Boxford Capital Managing Partner | Formerly Barracuda, SilverSky, Digital Guardian, OpenPages, Cybertrust • 3y

    Product management is accountable and responsible for assessing which problems to tackle. But I strongly believe it works best when it’s a process where everyone can provide input, there’s transparency on how decisions are being made (see question on feature planning), and where decisions are made based on market fact - not opinion. Any debate should be decided by data and market (customer) signal. As a PM, your market intelligence should come from as many sources as possible. Customers, partner ...Read More

    592 Views
    2 requests