Zoom on the Team : ScaleFlyt Product owner

Transferring the program from the UK to France means a new team has taken over the development. In each "Zoom on the Team" article you'll get to know the team behind ScaleFlyt. Today, for this first article we introduce our new Product Owner (PO), Vincent Villatte, who came right back from the outback to replace Nick, our esteemed SOARIZON PO, who did a wonderful job at maintaining customer happiness for 3 consecutive years from the UK To get to know Vincent better, here's a Q&A that introducing our new PO.

Q: Vincent, can you briefly describe your career to date ?

A: I have been with Thales for 21 years. Starting in 2001 in Bury St Edmunds (UK) as an Optronics Systems Engineer, where I worked mostly on airborne reconnaissance systems. In 2007, I moved to Australia where I joined our Joint Systems group working mostly on ground and naval reconnaissance systems. In 2015, I took the lead of technical operations at our Sydney-based Optronics Centre of Excellence and in 2018 I joined the Avionics team as Systems Engineering Manager. I led the Technical team that looked after Thales's products onboard the Tiger and NH90 helicopters in Australia. I was also supervising our Research and Development team, which is how I discovered SOARIZON - former name for ScaleFlyt. After deciding to return to Europe, I accepted the role and became ScaleFlyt's new PO in March 2022. 

Q: So you've known ScaleFlyt for a while, but what made you decide to be Product Owner ?

A: Indeed, it was an opportunity to diversify our market in Australia and I worked closely with the Dev team, then in the UK, to promote the product in Australia and explore new operational concepts. We set out to adapt the platform to meet Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) requirements. After completing the work, I joined the team, that had transferred to France, as the new PO, thus replacing Nick whom I've worked with since the beginning. 

My motivations for taking the PO role come from intimate knowledge of the product and a personal conviction that it is a truly amazing Digital Platform, which will enable large scale safe and lawful drone operations. 

I also nurture a certain curiosity for Digital Technologies and how one can apply Systems Engineering, a discipline that I value immensely, in the context of Digital Platform development. 

Q: Can you share with us some of your ambitions for the platform ?

A: The team's main objectives for ScaleFlyt are to make it a global platform both in terms of geographical reach and types of operations supported. ScaleFlyt Platform is at the heart of Thales Avionics drone ecosystem and supports all other drone-related products. It equally supports Thales and third-party products in the interst of our users who are our primary focus. 

Geographical expansion and support to a wide variety of operations while complying to international and local regulations are the challenges that our team embraces wholeheartedly. It is the diversity and complexity of the task that attracted me and motivates all members of the team. 

We set out to regularly present the next features that will provide greater value to our amazing and loyal users. We disclose what we are working on and will be delivering over the next quarter. Obviously we won't stop there and I would like to encourage our readers to check future newsletters to discover more about ScaleFlyt and upcoming improvements. 

Q: Finally, is there a message you would like to send to our readers? 

A: To make ScaleFlyt Platform a truly useful global solution we need feedback. We need to know what we can improve on and what features are the most important to our users. I would like to welcome every user to take a few minutes to note down what they would like to see, new or improved, on the platform. We want to provide tremendous user experience to make ScaleFlyt Platform the reference digital platform for all drones operations worldwide. We can only achieve this by being user-centric and inclusive. Anyone can contribute. We can all make ScaleFlyt Platform the ideal digital tool for our operation needs.