Fastly Hires Ex-Googler as Product Chief

Fastly has selected Lakshmi Sharma as its new Chief Product Officer to help bolster the company’s delivery, security, and edge compute portfolio.

At the global edge cloud network provider, Sharma will focus on the company’s long-term product roadmap and report directly to CEO Joshua Bixby.

Sharma joins from Google, where she was most recently the Director of Product Management for Networking for Google Cloud. Before that she held product and engineering leadership roles at Target, Cisco, and Juniper Networks.

In the company’s announcement, Bixby highlighted Sharma’s track record in driving effective strategy and transformation in engineering and product organizations and added that “Having been at the helm of product initiatives at technology giants and startups alike, Lakshmi knows what it takes to develop customer-centric, security-first roadmaps and bring innovative new products to market.”

Sharma joins the cloud network company almost six months after a devastating outage which caused Fastly’s customers, like Reddit, Amazon, and Twitch, to go offline. Earlier this month, Bixby revealed that a few of the company’s top customers paused using Fastly’s platform after the incident, but that they all returned.

“Some of the most vital parts of the internet run on Fastly and the company is uniquely positioned to power even more websites and applications with speed, reliability, and security,” Sharma stated. “I look forward to helping Fastly bring an enterprise-grade product roadmap -- grounded in the developer experience -- to life while maintaining a focus on building inclusive and effective teams.”