In 1990, the citizens of Boston were promised an extension to the metro system’s Green Line, a serpentine railway that meanders from the western suburbs of Riverside to as far east as Cambridge. More than 30 years later, the 4.3-mile northern expansion ending in Somerville’s sparkling new Union Station finally carried its first passengers across the $2.28 billion tracks.
The decades-long process was one that faced trial and tribulation, starts and stops, bureaucratic red tape and the court of public opinion. It didn’t always go smoothly, but the project got done.
The Green Line also winds its way through areas of Boston where companies today are launching exciting products that serve the public. For members of the tech industry, a product launch is the culmination of time and effort spanning across departments and personnel. While each company has its own timeline and workflow for showcasing the newest offering, most can agree on the chaotic balancing act that must be maintained before and after a pivotal launch.
It’s a challenging but rewarding time. From sales collateral and customer support to marketing and testing, any given item on the laundry list of duties could determine the success and failure of an inaugural release. But if all goes well, months or years of planning is finally realized as a product delivered into the hands of consumers.
While they didn’t quite take 30 years, the companies that Built In Boston sat down with also had product launches that required coordination between teams. Cultivating multifaceted strategies and methods, they rolled out impressive products across different areas of expertise — each milestone the result of meticulous teamwork.
Cybereason is a cybersecurity company.
Tell us about a recent product your team launched.
Cybereason is an enterprise security company that protects people and information in the new and open connected world, and our product management team actualizes that vision by creating and implementing a roadmap for the software product and services development. In January of this year, I led the product team to launch the full support of Endpoint Controls for Linux systems. Endpoint Controls is a set of features that allows security administrators to control connections made to employ laptops such as USB drives and Firewall.
This is a huge milestone value given to our customer, because in the growing Linux market space, we are empowering the security administrator to easily control and reduce the company attack surface, preventing possible USB-drive attacks like the Stuxnet attack on Iran’s nuclear facility in 2010. Linux systems, while just a fraction of the overall operating system market, are essential; they are used for the most essential systems that run the Internet, the stock market, critical infrastructure, production and the majority of networks that keep the economy and the entire nation running.
Product launch is the most challenging, but also the most fun part of the job for a product manager.”
What was the biggest challenge your team faced while developing this new product, and how did you overcome it?
The most difficult part of a product launch is creating a go-to-market strategy that is both big-picture and detailed enough to coordinate all cross-team tasks and processes. At the pre-release period of the software product lifecycle, a plan is created for all the moving pieces to fall in place when the product launches. As the product manager, I create a cohesive strategy that interlinks the feature handover by the engineering team to the support teams, the documentation and user instruction, the marketing content to be created around the product, the training content to be created for our internal sales team and the generation of KPIs to measure the product success.
To be successful at each of my product launches, I utilize a lot of graphics tools for go-to-market content creation and keep a kanban board of my to-do list. I’m also lucky to have rockstar coworkers and mentors who help us “win as one” in our product launch journey.
Product launch is the most challenging, but also the most fun part of the job for a product manager, because you finally get to reveal to the world months of work and reap the reward of seeing the software solve actual real world security problems.
EnterpriseDB is a provider of Postgres database management software and services.
Tell us about a recent product your team launched.
EnterpriseDB (EDB) is passionate about supporting open-source communities and helping modern enterprises accelerate innovation by leveraging the Postgres database platform. As such, we are the largest contributor to Postgres 14 and launched CloudNativePG on May 16 at KubeCon, the flagship conference for leading open source and cloud native communities.
CloudNativePG is an open-source operator that manages Postgres workloads on Kubernetes clusters, running in private, public, hybrid or multi-cloud environments. Some of the key benefits of combining the power of Postgres with Kubernetes are faster application development, reduced cost of development, highly automated operations and increased scalability in database services. For businesses looking to modernize their app stack or accelerate digital transformation, this is a game changer.
EDB did not stop there. We know that developers and DBA who use CloudNativePG may need enterprise-level support for mission-critical work. We enhanced our support for open source with the EDB Community 360 plan, which offers 24/7 access to expert support, troubleshooting, unlimited break and fix support and more.
Whenever there is a major industry event to anchor a launch, there is always natural tension because nothing can slip up and each team must deliver.”
What was the biggest challenge your team faced while developing this new product, and how did you overcome it?
EDB really wanted to launch CloudNativePG at KubeCon because it is the premiere event for cloud native communities. Whenever there is a major industry event to anchor a launch, there is always natural tension because nothing can slip up and each team must deliver.
EDB’s product, marketing, sales ops, technology and enablement teams came together to ensure we were market-ready and on time, which was no easy task. With high collaboration and each team taking ownership, CloudNativePG’s success throughout the development and commercialization process allowed us to overcome the time crunch.
Aura is a digital security and protection platform.
Tell us about a recent product your team launched.
In January 2022, we introduced a new password manager feature called Automatic Password Change. This feature allows users to automatically change their passwords for certain sites by clicking one button through the Aura app. Our password manager algorithm scans existing passwords for duplicated, weak or breached passwords, then directs users to change their passwords by automatically signing into the user’s account, finding the change password page and creating and saving a new, stronger password.
In March 2022, Aura launched a new proprietary feature called Online Security. With the rise in malware and phishing sites, your personal and financial info is at risk when you go online. Online Security was designed to prevent users from accessing dangerous websites that could steal your info. With one tap, it proactively blocks dangerous websites and sends a near-to-real-time push notification to inform a user about a blocked threat.
Aura’s Product Goals
What was the biggest challenge your team faced while developing this new product, and how did you overcome it?
For the Automatic Password Change, our biggest challenge came from understanding the password change specifics of each of the sites we added to the new feature. Each site has its own unique password changing user flows and pages which we needed to understand to develop a robust feature. We overcame this challenge by dedicating a team to automating the scripting process for specific sites. This team is tasked with delivering new sites with the ability to change passwords automatically and supporting and maintaining these sites.
For online security, the challenge we faced was when we first looked at the VPN data of domains customers visited. The table generated over 5 billion rows a day; reviewing an entire year of data was around 2.2 trillion rows. The data was so large that running standard queries was just not feasible. We overcame this by creating a data engineering process, mostly in Pyspark, that summarized a day of data from 5 billion rows down to 13 million rows while preserving as much of the data in a summarized format as possible. Once we got the data small enough, it was feasible to transform the data into a format to feed into a machine learning model.
3Play Media is a software company focused on video accessibility.
Tell us about a recent product your team launched.
3Play Media recently announced the extension of our services to the podcast industry. This announcement is critical to our future growth as a company. To-date, our TAM has been focused on video only, but now we can add audio files to that opportunity.
For our customers, this ensures they understand they can use our services for all their audio and video content, allowing them to further streamline their accessibility workflows.
This is a new market and brought about new personas.”
What was the biggest challenge your team faced while developing this new product, and how did you overcome it?
This is a new market and brought about new personas. We have to really understand the challenges this new persona faces given the uniqueness of podcast distribution. We also had to come up with new ways to provide a balance of high quality automatic speech recognition (ASR) and professional transcription output given the customer budget constraints. So, we’ve been developing ways to deliver an ASR transcript in minutes, which can then smartly decide to provide a professional transcript if quality is not high enough.
In addition, we offer an interactive player plugin that makes any player accessible — this is an emerging opportunity for podcasters, as to date most players are basic audio players with limited to no accessibility features.
With these two innovations on our existing platform, we are excited to see the impact we make entering into the podcast market.
