Meet Michael, VP Program Management and Operations at Hootsuite

Wondering what our Program Management and Operations team is? Get to know this growing group from the VP himself, Michael McQuade.

My supportive family!

What are you responsible for at Hootsuite?

In the Program Management and Operations areas of our PDT (Product, Development, Technology) organization, we have a team of 40+ people responsible for planning, predictability, security, privacy, production operations, and seamless end-to-end delivery of Hootsuite’s products. We are helping teams plan and deliver consistently, securely, and reliably.

Why did you join Hootsuite?

The opportunity to join a very hot and dynamic industry was appealing, but joining the company that developed the most widely used platform for social media management was a significant opportunity. I have been in multiple industries, working for diverse organizations ranging from government, management consulting, telecom, ecommerce and others. Joining a “product” company was important for me at this time.

Additionally, all the research I did, both formal and informal, came back with the same consistent themes. Hootsuite had a solid product, a dynamic and vibrant culture, and there was a genuine desire to learn and improve across all teams. The opportunity to help grow the industry’s top social media management solution to far greater heights in the years ahead was too good to pass up.

Tell us about your team and their successes this year.

The Program Management and Operations team is a diverse group that will grow throughout this year. The project management team has only been together a short period, while the security, privacy, and operations teams have existed for some time. In the past year, we have made some huge gains, including:

• Roadmap planning for greater than a quarter. Our first delivery with the PDT team was a 6 month view and we are working with the teams to build a 3 year view. We have also introduced the concept of “commit” and “target” functionality: priority content is committed to be delivered in a quarter, and targeted content is expected to be delivered, but the fidelity of planning or the relative priority may prevent it from delivering in quarter as planned.
• PDT reporting against roadmap plans every two weeks, including not only customer facing functionality, but PDT departmental deliveries as well. The bi-weekly reporting gives us a good view of how deliveries are progressing against plans, and highlights any potential risks or hot spots early so we can take corrective steps before they become issues. By having one source of truth and reporting consistently, we can reduce surprises for our numerous stakeholders.
• Predictability is improving! The target and commit concept is working as expected. Prior to this shift, monthly predictability ranged from low 50% to mid 70% for customer-facing deliveries. For 2019 Q3, we exceeded 90% predictability on both customer facing and PDT department commitments, ~70% for target content, and pulled in 15 unplanned or stretch features. The Q4 numbers are being tallied currently.
• Full Potential Analysis (FPA) product planning. This is an effort to determine “where to play, how to win.” In early August, we started with eight areas across the product that were being evaluated, grew to 10, and then re-worked into various options that would be considered for estimation. Several workshops later, including one at the end of September which had upwards of 70 people fully participating, we created three distinct options. By mid-December, we had delivered a strategy which combined a couple of the options and will build upon the foundation that we all agreed is necessary for our success.
• New roles, reporting, and certification. We created two new key roles within the organization to focus on product security and incident response. Risk management as a discipline was also established this year. On the compliance front, we expanded the scope of our SOC2 reporting, and also garnered the organization a new certification: UK Cyber Essentials Certification.
• Modernizing operations to improve reliability and streamline communications. Building a Kubernetes-to-EKS roadmap and migrating services to Kubernetes was a big deal for our Compute Platform team. Pipeline modernization and consolidating build resources to create one unified way to build and deploy our products was an important step for our Build, Deploy, and Test team. Improved system reliability is something we continuously strive to improve and we have established plans to improve system observability, monitoring, and alerting this year. Setting up a developer help desk and a follow-the-sun site reliability engineering (SRE) model to provide channels to collaborate and streamline communications has helped improve alignment with the development team.
• Delivering on our commitment to privacy. Privacy played an increasing role in how we deliver features and content. Commitment to privacy was demonstrated through the many reviews conducted during the development and implementation process. Privacy considerations were also addressed when working with large partners and social networks to ensure data is being managed properly throughout its lifecycle. We completed a PDT-level data inventory that allowed us to make smart decisions on prioritizing work for securing data. It was great to see our teams embracing the importance of being a trusted partner for our customers and our social network partners.

Our CTO leadership team.

Hootsuite deemed 2019 the “Year of Product.” How did you and your team contribute to the “Year of Product”?

There are many, many ways that our teams are contributing to the Year of the Product.

• Keeping the product team running! The Product Operations team has quite a broad mandate covering development compute platforms, build/test/deploy, reliability & engineering, observability, and operations. They provide infrastructure, software, tools, and expertise to assist the product development team in self-serving their infrastructure demands and create efficiencies throughout the product development lifecycle, while also maintaining the production environment necessary to meet our availability, security, and cost standards. Without them, our productivity and ability to deliver would be significantly lower.
• Securing our systems, data, and customer information. The InfoSec team has multifaceted responsibilities, all primarily focused around risk management and keeping our systems, data, and customer information secure. This manifests itself in a long list of functional verticals such as application security, AWS security, policy lifecycle management, compliance, risk management & advisory, sales support, security operations, and incident response. Collectively these functions are geared towards ensuring that Hootsuite’s product portfolio is secure and compliant, and the larger product hosting infrastructure is resilient.
• Development tracking. JIRA, our development tracking tool, is a robust but inconsistently implemented and used tool. As part of improving seamless delivery, we aligned and made the process and usage of the tool across PDT consistent.
• Product management. AHA, the product management tool that we had somewhat abandoned in the past couple of years, is being re-established as the strategy and roadmap tool for PDT. Our expectation is to use this tool in the future to communicate roadmaps and relative status.
• Release process. We deliver hundreds of releases a year, which is incredible! We do this through a significant amount of effort and ad hoc communication. We do not have a defined or consistent process. As part of the seamless delivery mandate, we are focusing on creating a structure so that releases are consistently delivered with all the supporting material and stakeholder communications.

Why is now an exciting time to be on your team?

I believe we are making a difference. All of the initiatives that the program management and operations teams are taking on are aimed at improving planning, communications, and delivery. Some are big changes, some are small; all are focused on reducing silos and building a better product.

I am also very excited about the momentum behind the roadmap and planning process. I believe this journey will go a long way to improving not only what we ultimately deliver, but how we do it.

What are the unique challenges about working on your team?

The PDT Program Management and Operations teams work across all PDT groups plus most other groups within Hootsuite. The dynamic pace of Hootsuite, plus the lean teams, means we wear many hats during a typical week. We need to be adaptable and be able to context switch quickly. We also need to be opinionated and be able to drive change across many facets of the organization.

What are three things you would tell someone starting a job at Hootsuite?

1. It’s a great opportunity to make a difference by bringing in valuable experience and combining it with the current culture to help the company mature.
2. It’s a dynamic environment, sometimes even chaotic. Embrace the energy and use it to drive improvements.
3. Help build bridges. Be open and part of the solution. Don’t settle for “that’s the way we have always done it”.

Hootsuite has the right ingredients to be even more successful than it already is. It has a very good product, it’s in a great market space, and it has a dynamic workforce that wants to learn, improve, and succeed. It also has an overwhelming number of dog lovers, and if you like dogs, this is the place!

My dog, Jasper!

To give our readers some more insight into who you are, can you tell us…

1. A valuable leadership lesson: Never stop trying. There is always a way, you just need to figure it out. People learn by doing and being uncomfortable; let them learn.
2. What or who inspires you? Underdogs. I always root for the underdog.
3. What’s the best advice you’ve ever heard? Focus on what you can do, not what you can’t. Get on with it, get stuff done. Don’t get caught up in what you don’t think can be done. If you think you can or can’t, you are probably right.

Intrigued at the opportunity of working on our program management and operations team? Check out our open roles within Production Operations & Security and Program, Project, & Release Management and you could be the next member of Michael’s growing team.