Frederic Levesque is the Head of Product for Emerging Business and Partnerships at AURA, a cybersecurity company, and is based in Taos, New Mexico. Originally from Montreal, Canada, he grew up writing and playing hockey before heading south to the University of Georgia, where he graduated cum laude. That dual background, analytical rigor on one hand and a deep creative practice on the other, has shaped how he approaches product work. Levesque leads strategy and execution for AURA’s partner-driven business channels, working with cross-functional teams to build scalable solutions that align partner needs with market realities in an industry where the stakes are consistently high. Beyond his professional role, he is a published poet, a woodworker, a cyclist, and an active volunteer in the Taos community, including work with Amigos Bravos, which protects the Rio Grande watershed, and the Equine Spirit Sanctuary. His range of interests is not incidental. It reflects a belief that the way you approach one discipline teaches you something useful about all the others.
How do you define success at this point in your career?
Success has gotten quieter over time. Early on, it looked like visibility, titles, forward motion for its own sake. Now it looks more like this: did the thing I built actually work for the people it was supposed to serve? Did the partner we built for get what they needed? That is the question I come back to. In product, you can optimize for a lot of things that feel like progress but do not actually move the needle for anyone who matters. I try to keep my definition of success anchored to whether the work created real value, not just momentum.
Was there a turning point that changed how you thought about your work?
Moving to Taos did something to me professionally, even though that was a personal decision. When you are not embedded in a tech hub, you lose some of the ambient noise that tells you what matters. The metrics that everyone else is watching, the narratives about what you should be building next. You get quieter, and in that quiet you start making decisions that are more genuinely your own. I think my work got sharper after I moved. I became less interested in what was trending and more interested in what was actually useful.
What role has failure played in building your career?
The product failures taught me more than any success I can point to. There is a version of product leadership that is about being right, about calling the market correctly and shipping the thing that wins. I spent some early time trying to be that person. What I found was that the most useful skill is not being right, it is recovering quickly, reading the data honestly, and not protecting the work you already did at the expense of the work you need to do next. Failure only becomes a liability when you pretend it did not happen.
How has your writing life influenced your professional one?
More than I usually say out loud. Poetry forces you to work in very tight constraints. You cannot hide behind extra words. You cannot explain your way out of a weak image. Either the thing lands or it does not. I think that has given me a certain intolerance for bloat in product work, whether that is bloat in a roadmap, in a feature set, or in a pitch. When something is not earning its place, I notice it. I am not sure I would have developed that instinct as early without the writing practice.
What habits have been most important to sustaining your career?
Staying curious outside the field. Woodworking, cooking, cycling, these are not productivity strategies. But they are practices that require full attention, and I think that attention is a muscle. The work I do at a workbench carries over into how I sit with a complex product problem. The discipline of finishing something with your hands and seeing the gap between what you imagined and what you actually built is useful context for any kind of creative or strategic work.
What is the hardest trade-off you have navigated in your career?
The trade-off between moving fast and building trust is real in cybersecurity in a way that it is not in other sectors. The pressure to ship, to grow, to show partner momentum, is constant. But the nature of what we are building means that a mistake in this space is not just a product setback. It is a trust setback. I have had to push back on timelines, on scope, on what we were willing to ship before we were confident in it. That is not always a popular position. But it is the right one.
What does success look like ten years from now?
I want to have built things that held up. That is the long version of the answer. The shorter version is that I want to still be learning, still be writing, and still be doing work that I can stand behind. The geography will probably still involve Taos. That part I have no ambiguity about.