New Relic names Brian Emerson Chief Product Officer
New Relic has appointed Brian Emerson as Chief Product Officer, placing him in charge of the Intelligent Observability Platform and the company's product strategy. He brings 25+ years of experience across product development and management, with leadership roles at ServiceNow, VMware, BMC Software, and Remedy.
Emerson will report to CEO Ashan Willy and lead the product management team with a clear focus: expand platform capabilities, deepen partner integrations, and keep pace with customer needs across infrastructure, applications, and AI pipelines.
Why this matters for product leaders
Observability is now a product capability, not a back-office tool. As software ships faster and AI features enter the stack, teams need a single view across systems, user journeys, and model-driven workflows-without bolting together a dozen dashboards.
That's the claim behind New Relic's Intelligent Observability Platform. The company says it shipped 25+ new features in the last year and now serves about 85,000 customers worldwide.
Track record that signals intent
At ServiceNow, Emerson served as Group Vice President & General Manager and reportedly grew the IT Operations Management business ninefold. He owned strategy, go-to-market, and product execution-useful muscle for a platform-led business competing on adoption and outcomes.
Earlier stops at VMware, BMC Software, and Remedy shaped his reputation for building widely adopted enterprise solutions. Expect that playbook to show up in how New Relic prioritizes roadmap, packaging, and partner motion.
Recognition and platform momentum
New Relic was named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms for the 13th consecutive time, with Gartner citing the platform's vision and execution, including support for workflows strengthened by AI. For context on the methodology, see Gartner's overview of Magic Quadrants: Gartner Magic Quadrant.
If you want a quick look at the product direction, start with the platform overview: New Relic Platform.
Leadership comments
Ashan Willy, CEO of New Relic: "Brian joins New Relic at a critical time as we accelerate our mission to empower organisations to thrive in an AI-first world. With his exceptional track record leading product management at successful global IT operations and cloud companies, Brian is the ideal executive to drive our innovation as we stay ahead of customer needs."
Brian Emerson, CPO of New Relic: "New Relic has differentiated itself in the market by making observability intelligent and proactive, saving businesses invaluable time and money. The opportunity to lead a world-class product team and bring new capabilities to the company's renowned platform is incredibly exciting. I look forward to partnering with the executive, product and engineering teams to help our customers move their businesses forward."
What to expect next
- Deeper support for AI-centric workflows: monitoring data pipelines, model performance, and user-facing impacts in the same view as app and infra signals.
- Clearer cost visibility: tooling that helps teams connect telemetry, performance, and unit economics to product decisions.
- Tighter partner integrations: less glue work for teams adopting best-of-breed services across the stack.
- More opinionated workflows: faster incident triage, faster RCA, and fewer clicks from signal to action.
Practical takeaways for product teams
- Instrument your AI features like any other user journey. Track latency, drift, and quality side-by-side with adoption and retention.
- Define SLOs that span app, infra, and AI pipelines. If a model degrades, you should see it before customers do.
- Bake cost metrics into your roadmap rituals. Tie performance gains to reduced spend and clearer unit economics.
- Reduce tool sprawl. Consolidate monitoring and tracing where it cuts lead time to detect and fix.
- Close the loop with GTM. Use observability data to inform packaging, pricing, and enablement-especially for AI features.
Industry context
IT operations and observability are growing as companies lean into cloud services, distributed applications, and AI. Emerson's background scaling ServiceNow's IT Operations Management business suggests New Relic will push hard on platform execution and partner leverage while keeping an eye on measurable outcomes.
If you're aligning your roadmap with AI capabilities and need to upskill your team, here's a curated catalog by job role: AI Courses by Job.
Your membership also unlocks:
