AMA: Flexera Chief Product Officer, Becky Trevino on Product Development Process

We run betas and early access programs for larger product launches where we have uncertainty and seek to reduce risk by a closer partnership with our customers. We seek participants by looking for our Ideal Customer (e.g. fits a set of criteria of who we believe will purchase the product and/or have the necessary experience to answer the open risk areas we need). And while that's the perfect way to get participants we often rely on our larger customers more often than the diverse set that we'd w ...Read More

We have both a Product and Engineering Operations team at Flexera. Our Product Ops org does the following: Product Analytics & Insights: Team owns the implementation of Pendo and a centralized PowerBI site we call The Hive that enables us to have all the analytics we need to run operations in one place. PDLC Execution: Our Ops team works us through the Product Lifecycle enabling us to ensure we deliver on P0, P1, and P2 epics and that the we have give the team the necessary context to priori ...Read More

Standardizing on our tooling is still a work in progress for us at Flexera. Part of the reason it's been so hard for us is we've worked through two acquisitions in the last two years. And getting different teams working on a standard Ways of Working (WoW) is easier said than done.Here's where we've made progress: Confluence: Standardize source for requirements, one-page problem templates, and PRFAQs Jira: Standard source for Initiatives, Epics, and User Stories Figma and Dovetail: Standard sourc ...Read More

At the end of the day when measuring product, the ultimate measure is how well the product portfolio is doing in market. The mission of product management is to balance the needs of the business with the needs of our customers. If we're meeting all of our Objective and Key Results (OKRs) and the business isn't growing, our product team is not performing well. Yes, we are delivering BUT our delivery isn't translating into growth for the business. In this scenario, you need to understand what's hu ...Read More

We do retrospectives post-launch but what has been most successful to our team is that we send a weekly progress update to our stakeholders for major launches. Typically, we have stopped the weekly progress update at the end of launch. Our platform team kept the weekly update coming and given this update is delivered via a Teams Chat it's given a great feedback loop for GTM, our Senior Leadership Team, and others to give feedback on our plans, for us to share customer sentiment, and for us to ge ...Read More

Deciding between build, buy, and partner is a regular conversation at Flexera. Here is how we work it through: Build: Capabilities that are core to our business and that we have an expertise in and we have found no one in market that is doing this work better than we are today Buy: Capabilities that we believe are necessary for us to win or retain customers but would take too long for us to build and there is a potential partner in the market that is already doing this better than us Partner: Ca ...Read More