15 years of technical depth running through the marketing, not behind it. That's the edge.
The technical background doesn't sit behind the marketing work. It runs through it. Most product marketers learn the technology through briefings and analyst reports. I learned it by building lab environments, running demos, supporting deals, and architecting deployments inside demanding enterprise environments. That depth shows up in how the marketing lands with a technical buyer.
When a CISO pushes back on a product claim, I'm not reading from a script. I understand the environment they're running, the constraints they operate under, and the gap between what vendors promise and what actually happens in production.
Credibility with a technical executive doesn't come from reading analyst reports. It comes from having worked in the environments the marketing is supposed to speak to.
My IT career started at Zimmerman Advertising, part of Omnicom, in Fort Lauderdale. The Level II role covered 600+ workstations across a 60/40 Windows and Mac environment, 24x7 executive support, Citrix XenApp administration, VMware/vSphere uptime management, FreePBX VoIP, mobile device management across iOS/Android/BlackBerry, SOX compliance via Symantec Endpoint Protection, and deployment of 300+ systems. Full-stack IT generalist work before anyone called it that.
I moved to Level III within a year, supervising a team of five engineers and serving as the escalation point for anything outside helpdesk scope. Then into an Infrastructure Engineer role: built out an AWS environment from scratch (EC2, S3, SES, IAM, VPC) in early 2012, led a VMware P2V migration from Windows Server 2003 physical hosts to virtual 2008 R2, managed IBM DS4800 SANs across 60+ terabytes, and ran SOX compliance audits. Cloud infrastructure work in 2012 — before it was the default assumption.
I started at Citrix in 2012 as a Senior Technical Specialist and Virtual Lab Specialist. Three years in virtualized application and desktop delivery, learning how it actually works in complex enterprise environments, not just how it's supposed to work. The networking dependencies, the profile management edge cases, the printing issues that always made it into production. I earned the Citrix expert-level certifications during this period.
From Citrix, I moved to JPMorgan Chase as a Global Citrix Operations Architect. A different scale entirely, and one of the most security-conscious, compliance-heavy organizations in the world. Security posture there isn't just policy. It's infrastructure baked into every layer of the stack.
My first SE role. RES Software focused on workspace automation and IT service delivery, giving enterprise IT teams programmatic control over the user environment before "digital employee experience" became a product category. Moving from an internal role into a field-facing SE position changed how I thought about communicating technology. The fluency was the same. The audience and stakes were different.
Varonis was where data security became the lens. As a Sales Engineer, I was in front of enterprise security teams showing them what their data exposure actually looked like, and it was almost always worse than they expected. The VCTA was the formal credential. The real education was learning how enterprises fail to govern their own data, and how to make that problem land with buyers who needed to act on it.
The SE work continued through Zscaler and Palo Alto Networks — marketing first then SE at PAN, Director of Product Marketing then Channel SE at Cato. The marketing and field work have alternated throughout, each sharpening the other. That full arc is covered in the SASE and Product Marketing pages.
If you're looking for someone who knows the technology from the inside and can build the narrative around it.