Introduction
Earlier this year marked an inflection point for me both personally and professionally. It marked a full decade since I dove into the deep end of the Cyber industry. In 2013 I joined the Comodo inside sales team to sell SSL Certificates, making 120 painstaking calls per day. I learned more on that sales floor than probably any experience since. While it was short-lived because I transitioned to the marketing team, I’m grateful that the CEO Melih Abdulhayoglu gave me that fateful chance, because it was the perfect springboard into an exciting Cyber adventure.
More than a decade has passed, and, well, “I got a story to tell.” Today I’m launching Cyber PMM! Cyber PMM is a personal blog/newsletter/website/brand (whatever). Cyber PMM is not connected to my employer’s views whatsoever – all opinions are my own.
Through Cyber PMM, I’ll be sharing product/solutions marketing “formulas” that I’ve seen actually work after 17 years of total product marketing experiences across industries. The main <trace source> material will be based on observations from the past decade in Cyber.
My checkered past consists of a hop-skip from Comodo in 2013 to Optiv, Dell Secureworks, Siemplify, VMware, Cisco, and now at Splunk. I also can’t forget the additional 7 years prior to that, where I marketed products and services across larger brands, consulting gigs and startups, with 5 years spent in Asia. It’s been a roller coaster. That’s lots of projects, lots of assignments, lots of great people met, and lots of miles travelled.
Why Now?
You may know the scene from my favorite movie The Lord of the Rings, when Bilbo Baggins stands before his fellow Hobbits and the camera zooms in on him as he says to himself, “I’ve put this off for far too long.”
That’s the feeling I’ve had lately. In deciding whether or not I should jump into this arena, I’ve gone back and forth between “It’s time” and “just play it safe – keep quiet”. But I’ve really put this off for far too long. As the saying goes, “better done than perfect.” It’s time.
And having launched dozens of products and services in my career, I know there’s never a perfect time to launch. Let’s not overthink this. Cyber PMM isn’t complex piece of revenue-generating hardware or software, it’s just content – for now. This isn’t about me anyway. Read on to see what it’s really about.
About Cyber PMM
Since Cyber PMM is technically a “product” that I’m launching, I obviously need to provide a concise description of what I’m offering, so here it goes:
Cyber PMM creates open-source content, tools, and frameworks for product marketing professionals in the cybersecurity industry for the sanity of buyers and practitioners.
There’s a story behind why I use a blue whale what in the shape of a “C” as my icon. This icon illustrates how Cyber PMM will be creating order out of chaos of being a product marketer in cybersecurity.
Mission and Vision
If you’re into concise Mission and Vision statements like I am, here is where I landed. This will help me stay within bounds and grounded along this journey.
Mission: To create an open source library of content, frameworks, and tools that bring order to Cyber PMMs and sanity for buyers.
Vision: A world where cyber products and services are accurately represented in a clear, honest, and organized way for the sanity of buyers.
Is this really needed?
I can hear the criticism already. Dane has lost it, he’s officially off the deep end. While I’m admittedly close, I’m not there yet! 🙂
I’m convinced Cyber PMM is at least worth a try, because I’ve seen the insides of the machine and know something is broken. The life of a product marketer is a challenging, nearly impossible one, especially in the chaotic and confusing cybersecurity industry. If you’re in the industry you know that Cyber is a unique beast. PMM practices in other industries, while informative, don’t transfer well to Cyber.
Another big issue is that too many of us Cyber PMMs are facing burnout and misery. This is an effect of constant changes in managers, being flooded with (useless?) meetings and other soul-crushing corporate activities that distract us from mindful work. It’s hard enough to be a good PMM and know our products, markets and customers, but to then have to deal with an internal bureaucracy is where the burnout and misery is happening.
Many Cyber PMMs feel stuck on a treadmill that keeps picking up in speed (produce this, attend that, speak here, write that) with no end in sight because there are unclear objectives. There’s no scoreboard – nobody has a sense of having reached a destination, so we are in a void of directionless-ness. It’s like jumping in your car and you start driving, but never get anywhere. If we don’t have an end in mind, how will we know where we’re going? Cyber PMM is here to help change this.
The other fact is that buyers and practitioners rely on us to make sense of our products and services for them. Most buyers are doing their own research and we need to meet them there. We can’t just accept what Product is pushing without any thought as to the value it provides for buyers and practitioners. After all, aren’t PMMs supposed to be the voice of our customers? Too often in Cyber, PMMs are entirely disconnected from customers altogether. That bridge was blown up a long time ago, mostly by Product and Sales teams, but its also really our own doing. By taking a back seat to those customer conversations, we’ve taken a back seat to strategy and development.
For example, recently I read an article in the Wall Street Journal, about how Midea reinvented the window air conditioner. And it was led by Product Marketing. Do you think that is even close to happening in Cyber? Nope. Here is a quote I pulled, “We all thought: There has to be a better way of doing this,” said Rodrigo Teixeira, Midea America’s product marketing director, who led a team that spent five years reinventing the window AC.
Rodrigo is a PMM hero. Listening and bringing sanity to buyers can have a real impact across our industry. I’m not saying we should spend 5 years developing a new piece of software, but imagine if we rose to the challenge that Midea took on and truly listened to customer challenges. It’s time to try.
If you think you can’t change anything, I highly recommend reading Extreme Ownership to understand the idea of taking responsibility for the problems around us, instead of just complaining that things are broken. Why can’t we define what good looks like for Cyber PMMs? We can establish metrics and define clear priorities with confidence. We can push back against Finance, Product and Sales teams that question our existence by demonstrating value by aligning to customer needs. All of this will require our own science to be successful but there are very few proven formulas that work in practice in our industry.
I’ll start building these formulas by pulling from my own experience and testing them against your experience, and we can meet in the middle. While my experience is the foundation for what I share here, I want to add the experiences of the broader Cyber PMM community too. This will help to continue iterating on published content, tools, templates, and frameworks that can be broadly applied across any PMM working for any cyber vendor. So if you’re in my network or we’ve worked together in the past, be on the lookout for an invite to discuss your experiences as well!
So that’s that. My first post and hopefully the first of many. I look forward to taking this journey with you, and stay tuned for more updates soon. My first posts will detail a vision for Cyber PMMs, to better define a destination before we start driving.
Stay tuned for future posts by subscribing to the newsletter on Substack or directly on the Cyber PMM website. You can also follow Cyber PMM or me on LinkedIn.
