He credits the whole Palo Alto Networks IT Services team for its support while his time has been limited, especially as the unprecedented demands of getting the entire company transitioned to remote work were at their peak.

The Product Management Academy is a two-year, rotational PM program for new grads. The rotations provide breadth and depth of experiences and give exposure to different customer challenges we solve as a company. It also introduces you to the unique problem-solver style of product management here at Palo Alto Networks. It fosters a high degree of analytical and product rigor by virtue of being on high-impact projects where you will be constantly challenged to deliver different outcomes while learning by doing.

For someone early in their career, this is a great opportunity to work with technology you’ve never used before. We use Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and a streaming engine called Dataflow, as well as the industry-standard Apache Beam, to stream data to our customers and internal apps in real-time. We use BigQuery in GCP to build indexes and handle complex SQL queries with fast response times.

Customer Success at Palo Alto Networks is the opposite of what my prior experiences were. It’s a very positive position in that we’re not selling, per se — we’re reminding customers of the continuous value of our products and helping them to successfully obtain that value. For example, rather than talking about ticket numbers or problem cases, we’re talking about adoption, new features, giving best practice guidance and— as the name suggests — how to achieve success with the product. Customer Success means always finding ways for customers to achieve value.