I had the pleasure to speak in front of ~120 very skilled security professionals the other day. I am not a very experienced speaker, so these types of engagements wear me out until after the presentation is over – and then I feel energized.
The talk wasn’t about a feature or component I work with very closely, but about security component that I know well, but not represent usually. The familiarity of that component comes from the fact that it’s a very central component that most customers would use and start out with. It’s prominent with customers and well-known across the org. Why I got to speak about a feature area I don’t directly work on? Our team is very distributed and I belong to a subsidiary with a few friends there – who organized for and ran a day for security professionals. Instead of flying someone in, they asked me if I could represent a the security feature that should be “close to me”. Of course, I’ll come!
There’s a lot I took away with me from that session and the conversation after. Clearly the first takeaway is that coming out of your comfort zone, catch up on a feature area that you may have lost touch with and familiarize yourself with the latest, is important. It keeps me on my toes – and in this case, forced me to train my high-level overview of the feature area again. Since most of the audience wasn’t familiar with the feature set and there we also a fair amount of less technical decision makers in the room, I had to be able to present the feature area also on a level that’s not usually my flight height – and I needed to deliver a little bit of value prop and context to lay some foundation, before diving in. That also meant that I re-think the timing and the focus of the session – and what detail areas I wanted to dive into. Hm.
That thought lead to a few additional considerations – with limited time and an audience that I don’t want to go detail-level-deep, I needed to look at the feature area with a different pair of eyes: some wouldn’t necessarily want to hear about the latest features, but learn about the value prop, greater context and where in the larger security landscape it is at – and where in an attack timeline, or kill chain, the feature prevents stuff from happening. So that no only required a little bit of a product/feature refresh for me, but also thinking about the high-level pitch and where and how, for the target audience, the feature set is to be positioned.
Personally, it was interesting to be exposed to conversations and feedback about another product area. I learned a lot about how people think about it than I did before – which was based on our own marketing material and the value prop we had written ourselves. There’s a few feedback items that I had noted down, to relay to the feature team. I am fairly sure it’s not phrased in the natural language that that team, or the security-minded audience I spoke with, would use. It’s most certainly more along the lines of “normal human language”, and I am not sure if that’s helpful or not. It is however fairly refreshing, as feedback for my own area of comfort would come with the wording, acronyms and jargon I am used to speaking with my own team.
Following the session, a few from the audience came by and engaged in a friendly chat about the talk, and asked a few clarifying questions, but also about a few directional aspects, of how the product would evolve and if specific use cases were in planning that they needed. I could only contribute on a very high level to that discussion, with a promises for follow ups – but I could capture learnings in regards to how the product is perceived and how customers want to leverage it (further) in the future – also good input for the partnering feature teams.
As I have gained more confidence with the conversations, I’ve tried to explore if there are any overlapping scenarios or areas that customers saw between the features I presented on and the actual features and capabilities that most work on. I tried to see if these security experts saw value in thinking about or sharing actual experience on how my feature area could solve a number of puzzles. Not that we’ve promised anything during the session – but this is interesting fodder for either the backlog, or for quick wins, if there’s a set of scenarios that we *just* need to better describe in our documents and training estate, or let our field personnel know that engage with customers directly, to socialize these “cross-over” scenarios better. In any case, I was fishing for inspiration and trying to draw from these experts’ unique work experience.
What I inevitably got, was insights into what’s top-of-mind for people, what challenges they had and what they needed solutions for. Clearly not all of the things are directly in the product area I work in – but some of the things I would be able to forward on to colleagues or thing about from a trends perspective, that *could* influence some of the product planning. In any case, it was good hearing out what very smart people are trying to solve for themselves and their companies, and why they found these challenges interesting or, well, especially challenging. It’s a great learning experience.
All in all, this has dragged me out of my little bubble and widened my horizon, if only temporary, but reminded me that a lot of people have other, far greater, more urgent challenges to solve than the stuff I may be working on right now. It’s a humbling and also earthing thought. I should do this more often.
FRICKELSOFT 