Product Strategy at a Hyper-Growth Cyber Company — Dana Gilboa, CPO of Armis

In this episode

• Armis's growth strategy rests on two axes in parallel: deepening in existing markets and verticals (OT/IoT, Healthcare, federal) and expanding the product lines — all connected to the Centrix platform and fed by the Asset Intelligence engine that has seen billions of devices.
• When choosing product people, skills are secondary because they can be learned — what Dana looks for first are traits: sharpness of thought, the ability to prioritize and cut a decision, the ability to distill a message, and excellent communication with development, Sales, R&D, and marketing.
• The central tension in product management at this stage is the balance between giving the large install base its feature requests and the need to innovate and solve tomorrow's problems — where the main fuel for innovation is close dialogue with customers through forums like the Customer Advisory Board.
• The build-vs-buy decision derives from focus: what's at the core of the product is built in-house, and when there's a business opportunity whose pace is hard to keep up with (Silk Security) or a domain that requires unique expertise (CTCI) — you go to M&A.
• Effective innovation is bottom-up: when you give developers and data science people deep knowledge about the problem space and about what the user is trying to do, they arrive at better solutions than the ones the PM thought of — solutions aimed at the business need and not at engineering elegance.
• Dana's superpower, from her development days, is taking a complex, messy problem and breaking it down into 'boxes' and a flowchart — and encouraging product people (and especially women, who usually feel less comfortable) to 'be the person with the marker,' to ask the questions and lead to the solution.