Akshay Bhargava is the Chief Product Officer at Malwarebytes. Malwarebytes is described as the leading advanced malware prevention and remediation solutions provider. In this role, he leads product organization, guides all Research and Development activities, and drives the company’s technology vision/product road map. He previously served as Vice President for Oracle’s Cloud Business Group, as a product executive at FireEye, and as a management consultant at McKinsey & Co.
Akshay is a board adviser to several tech startups and was named one of The Software Report’s Top 25 Software Product Executives of 2020. A proven thought leader, Akshay writes for Forbes Technology Council and is a frequent speaker at industry events. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from MIT Sloan.
Some of the takeaways you will get from listening to this interview with Akshay are how to apply a purpose-built framework to product innovation. Akshay is using this for security innovation, but this is a framework that you can apply to any innovation. On LinkedIn, he has a really nice interaction with the CIO and CISO community about this innovation framework.
You will also learn about how to remove luck from the innovation process. He is a big proponent of removing luck in the innovation process.
Another takeaway is how to align customer pain, feature requests, and customer empathy with purpose in building your products. How to stop responding to endless feature requests and build products.
Also discussed is how to prioritize and choose what to do and what not to do with product development. We also talk about the mindfulness and Zen approach to security. There is research that is done that compares users that have been trained in mindfulness versus users who haven’t been. There is a stunning 38% decrease in hitting inadvertent malware.