Michel Feaster: evaluation

Transcript context

…Wow. I bet. Really amazing. I spent half my time there in the field in New England and in fact, started out really just POC-ing and selling technology. I was very blessed. As the company scaled, I ended up owning more strategic accounts from a technical pre-sales perspective. So when you’re selling to GE or Fidelity, they’ll say “No. We want a three-year roadmap with Mercury. We want to talk about how to partner strategically.” So I started to work very closely with a product organization and eventually moved out to California and took my first product role. I was very blessed. I was the second product manager of a product called LoadRunner which when I took over that product was already a $250 million business. It had 65 percent market share. Customers loved it, the product worked. So I learned product management or how to think about product strategy taking over like an incredibly successful business and so I was given such freedom to put it in tele sales, put it in partners, innovate on the product. And I can’t imagine a better school of product management. I rotated around. I basically managed all pieces of the testing business. And then when we got acquired by HP, my boss called me and said, “Hey, there’s this really broken business.” So this is now the time when virtualization is just exploding in the enterprise. Opsware probably is the market leader and data center automation competing with BladeLogic at IBM. HP had a business. This is kind of 5 years after the pivot. Or in 2007 now, virtualization is finally a thing.…

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