Executive spotlight: iovation’s new Vice President of Product
Last week iovation announced that Dwayne Melancon was leaving Tripwire after 17 years and joining the company as the new Vice President of Product, so we decided to get in touch and see what are his future plans.
“My experience at Tripwire ran the gamut – I served in a range of roles, from CTO to product management to head of R&D – but my ultimate goal was to create products that offered both a streamlined user experience and market-leading security protection,” he told us.
This experience will be invaluable, he notes, as iovation shifts from a single product to a portfolio of solutions.
“I’ve spent years working with boards and senior executives, and my philosophy is one of connecting risk and risk mitigation to the entire business, including the boardroom. I plan to work closely with our entire executive team to navigate the convergence of fraud and authentication and guide development of products that connect these two markets,” he added.
“This is a team sport, and the board is part of the winning team in an effective organization. This applies outside of iovation, as well – I’ll take advantage of my experience with C-level executives to work with our customers to help them understand risk in the context of their businesses, and to take business-aligned steps to counteract that risk. After all, the shape of a company’s security investment should match the shape of its risk.”
Infosec innovation
Few areas in IT have grown and evolved as quickly as security in the past few years.
“While all of iovation’s executives are driven by the same mission – to make the internet a safer place for people to do business – VPs in the product space need to not only keep up with the industry but see things ahead of the curve. We need to be able to anticipate trends and create products that satisfy needs that our customers may not even be aware of,” Melancon points out.
The thing with innovation is that it’s viewed through the “eyes of the beholder” and that makes it a challenge for product executives.
“Fortunately, I find that the best way to hit the mark is to consume a lot of data, both on what is happening from a technology perspective, and from connecting with a lot of customers to identify trends in their needs and challenges. My habit is to meet with hundreds of customers each year, and to leverage the data that’s available through community, partnerships, and public information sharing to provide the best opportunity to identify innovation that will connect with customers’ ideas and expectations of value,” he says.
Another important facet is agility – information security changes quickly, and that means solutions providers need to experiment, iterate, and improve continuously. For that, a unique combination of consistency and flexibility is required.
Reducing friction
Yet another challenge is tied to meeting the demands of today’s fast-paced threat landscape. Hackers and fraudsters have become amazingly sophisticated, and they’re able to quickly pivot and adjust course when fraud prevention solutions succeed. They have also become quite good at sharing information with each other, so they can help each other evade the good guys.
“Our biggest challenge is how to continue to outsmart these would-be fraudsters without impacting the user experience. Companies whose products both prevent fraud and reduce user friction for consumers will establish themselves as leaders of the pack — which is why I chose to come to iovation now,” Melancon shared.
“The company is uniting fraud prevention, authentication and a streamlined user experience in a way that’s never been done, and I’m really excited about the opportunity to bridge those competing worlds with unique SaaS-based solutions.”
And, when if comes to information sharing, iovation fights fire with fire – they are leveraging a long-standing community of customers who share information about what the bad guys are doing, so the good guys can stay one step ahead. “That’s unique in the fraud and authentication world,” he concludes.