Riding Innovation Waves (Without Wiping Out)

Survive the chaos of innovation waves by spotting patterns, timing your moves, and leading smarter through market resets.

The Startup Bug Never Left

Back in college, I was all in on entrepreneurship. I even started our school's first entrepreneurship club in its 100-year history and started a student-run business on campus which still operates today. I took a trip to Harvard to attend an entrepreneurship conference, and also visited Google's HQ to see what Silicon Valley was really like. These were the days back when Google was still the scrappy underdog and Facebook had just launched, so the times were really exciting. The point is, I've always been fascinated by innovation.

I never built the next Google—but the itch to build, launch, and disrupt never left. That's probably why I gravitated toward product marketing—especially product launches. It's the part of the job that puts you closest to the edge of innovation as "intrapreneurs".

Peter Drucker called innovation "creative destruction"—a fancy way of saying new ideas replace the old guard. In cybersecurity, startups are usually the ones doing the destroying. Bigger vendors? They tend to settle into comfortable patterns. As I detail in my recent book, Through the Cyber Maze, I've worked at seven different companies, from scrappy startups to giants. That range showed me both sides of the innovation coin.

PMMs Live in the Middle of the Mayhem

PMMs sit right in the blast zone between builders and buyers. We translate engineering into something a CISO will care about. That means we're constantly being thrown into innovation cycles—sometimes before a product is even ready.

To do this job well, you need one superpower: adaptability. If you're hiring for PMM roles and not screening for adaptability, you're going to regret it. You can teach anyone your messaging framework, systems and processes. You can't teach anyone how to stay sane during crazy deadlines, launches, pivots, layoffs, rapid responses and reorgs. That's an aptitude they need to come equipped with.

Cloud Changed Innovation Velocity