AMA: Cisco Director of Product Management, Reid Butler on Product Development Process

I love having access to  purpose-built beta management tools, they've become critical to our release strategy. The software available now for A/B testing, feature flags, and controlled rollouts makes it easy to release functionality to specific customer segments and gather feedback quickly. We can iterate in real-time based on what we're learning. When planning a feature release, the beta period is baked into the timeline from the start. We structure these programs with enough runway to actually ...Read More

Each of our product teams has some flexibility in how they operate, but I've found that aligning around traditional agile and scrum frameworks tends to work best for maintaining consistency without being overly prescriptive. Process to me is meant to serve as guardrails, not a one-size fits all mandate of exactly how each team should operate. It’s always a balance between consistency and allowing the teams some flexibility to find what works best for them.  I typically run two-week sprint cycles ...Read More

Absolutely! We don't just ship something and move on to the next item. That'd be careless, right? Every feature or product we push out to our customers gets measured pretty obsessively. Engagement metrics, retention curves, customer satisfaction scores, etc. We're tracking how people actually use what we built versus how we thought they'd use it, and being honest, those two things don't always line up exactly as we expected.  The measurement part varies depending on what we're launching (that's ...Read More

Honestly, a lot of it comes down to experience….both individual and organizational. We look at what we've built before, what our teams are capable of, and where uncertainty exists in the concept. Those data points inform the estimation process more than any formula could. There are traditional agile practices, story pointing, planning poker, velocity tracking, but past experience combined with deep collaboration gets you the most accurate estimates. Not saying you shouldn’t use those methods, th ...Read More

AI has shifted how we approach roadmap planning, primarily by accelerating our ability to process and synthesize information at scale. For me, the ability to work through massive amounts of data far more efficiently is the biggest gain. Research synthesis that used to take days now happens in hours. We can pull insights from broader datasets, identify patterns across customer feedback, and spot emerging opportunities much faster than traditional methods allowed. The part that I love seeing is ho ...Read More