Most product marketers learn the product from a brief. I learned it from the field.
Enterprise security buyers are technical. They ask hard questions about architecture, implementation, and edge cases. They have seen enough vendor pitches to recognize when someone is working from a slide and when someone actually knows what they are talking about. The SE background is not a footnote in my PMM work. It is the foundation that makes the messaging credible in rooms where credibility is hard to establish.
I came to product marketing after years as a sales engineer at Zscaler, Varonis, and RES Software. By the time I was writing positioning documents, I had already been in the room running the demos, fielding the hard technical questions, and watching which explanations made a security architect lean forward and which ones made them check their phone. That experience shapes everything: how I structure a message, what I include, and what I leave out.
The best security messaging starts with the buyer's real problem. Not the product. The framework for how the product matters follows from understanding that problem precisely.
My formal entry into product marketing was at Palo Alto Networks as Technical and Product Marketing Manager for SASE. I shaped how Prisma Access was positioned externally, built the content and enablement that supported the field, and represented the product at the Executive Briefing Center and Ignite Conference. A year later I transitioned into an SE Specialist role at PAN, still focused on SASE. Going back into the field to test the narrative I had helped build is one of the sharper professional experiences I have had. You find out quickly what holds up under pressure and what does not.
At Cato Networks I spent three-plus years as Director of Product Marketing. I owned content strategy, competitive intelligence, sales enablement, and the external narrative for the platform. The most significant outcome: coordinating Cato's Gartner Magic Quadrant positioning in 2024 with Product Management. That process requires translating product capability into analyst language with precision, and the SE background is what makes that translation accurate rather than aspirational. Cato was recognized as a Gartner MQ leader.
Other outputs during that period: a full product section of the website rebuilt from scratch in two months, competitive intelligence programs that gave sales real language instead of talking points, and a partner technical development program that drove material increases in partner engagement. Awards: Outstanding Contribution to Sales and Company MVP.
From Cato I moved to Zero Networks as Director of Product Marketing, working on identity-based microsegmentation, a technically dense product in a category that hadn't fully crystallized yet. The challenge was translating a genuinely differentiated architecture into language that resonated with buyers who had enough vendor fatigue to be skeptical of anything that sounded like another zero trust pitch.
Most security marketing fails not because the writer doesn't understand marketing. It fails because the writer doesn't understand the product well enough to earn the reader's trust.
Positioning and messaging are the foundation. Getting them right means understanding the buyer's problem before it means knowing the product. That starts with field time and real customer conversations, and ends with a messaging hierarchy that everyone from SDR to CEO can draw from without it feeling like a constraint.
Competitive intelligence in security is a specific craft. Enterprise buyers evaluate alternatives. A CISO who has been through ten vendor processes knows every playbook by name. I build competitive programs that give sales the right framing without making them sound scripted, because a security executive will notice the difference and it will cost you the deal.
Sales enablement is the most consistently underfunded part of most PMM functions. A deck that lives in a folder no one opens is not enablement. I build materials around the actual conversations sales is having, informed by field time, and I keep them short enough to actually be used.
At Onyx Security, all of this runs simultaneously. There is no sequencing, no inherited infrastructure, and no playbook. The founding marketer job is about judgment and pace: knowing which things matter most when everything feels urgent, and building something that can scale once it is right.
Whether it's positioning, a launch, or building a PMM function from scratch.