Competing for the Future
My Experience in Secure the Future 2019
Last fall, as part of my final year of my Master of Science program in information and communication sciences at Ball State University (BSU), one of my professors, Dr. Steve Jones, approached me one day and told me that he had recommended me and two fellow students as potential candidates to participate in Palo Alto Networks’ Secure the Future Academic Competition, the first of its kind.
Though I had already determined that I was interested in a career in data science and specialized in it, I had been interested in cybersecurity since my first years in engineering school at IMT Atlantique (in France) prior to my enrollment at BSU. My studies and personal research had not only helped me to learn more about the common types of cyberattacks, such as DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) or social engineering techniques, but also to understand the devastating effects cybercrime can have on small and large businesses, individuals, and the society as a whole. A 2019 report estimated the cost of cybercrime worldwide to be about $600 billion (USD) per year, and each year this figure increases.
Participating in this competition, I realized, would be a tremendous opportunity to learn more about cybersecurity, as well as about Palo Alto Networks, a leader in the fight to secure the digital world. Not only would the competition be a great learning experience and opportunity for exposure to industry professionals, but the top three competitors would receive cash prizes of up to $10,000 and would be offered the opportunity to interview for internships and/or full-time employment with Palo Alto Networks. Although I knew it would take months of hard work, I was excited to participate.
The competition was developed by the company as a way to engage more students in the field and provide a pipeline for new talent to the company. It was designed “to challenge student candidates to make decisions regarding the protection of operational assets through the analysis, comparison, and selection of advanced security tools, methodologies, and implementation options.” Competitors each had to select an industry — finance, health care, energy, or a sector of our choice — then research and develop a competition report, summary video, and presentation that would include methodologies for deploying end-to-end attack detection, alert triage, threat hunting, investigation, orchestration, and automated response activities.
Money is very often listed as the first motive of cyber attacks, such as ransomware or phishing. The money cyber attackers extort from their victims is then withdrawn from the scrutiny of financial institutions and laundered by financing all kinds of illegal activities. Preventing this money from leaving its normal circuit as much as possible is therefore an important step in reducing these crimes. So I selected the finance industry as my area of focus, as I knew that threat actors had increasingly been targeting banks and because I believe that strengthening security in this sector is essential to building a safer world. I wanted to focus on what could be done to further improve the security of the banking industry. This would be the focus of my research for the next four months.
The competition was comprised of four phases, the first being the qualifier phase, during which time candidates took a pre-test to determine whether we had the fundamental skills necessary to compete. Only those who successfully passed the qualifier round were invited to continue on to phase 2, the competition research, and learning phase. This stage was quite challenging, as I needed to conduct independent research while also completing a four-module course of assignments and assessments — as well as completing my coursework for the last semester of my degree program.
In the third phase, we completed and submitted our competition reports as well as a five-minute video summary of our research. The top 10 candidates from this group would be invited to phase 4, which involved preparing a 15-minute slide deck presentation about how to secure the future of our selected industries, which included a five-minute Q&A with the board members at Palo Alto Networks.
My hard work paid off because I was fortunate to be one of the top 10 candidates selected to move on to the final round, and in the end, I placed third in the competition. Not only did I receive a cash prize of $2,500, but after four rounds of interviews, I also was offered a full-time position as a Data Scientist with Palo Alto Networks, which I accepted and started in February 2020 and have truly enjoyed.
My main take-away in this competition regarding the security of the financial sector is that we must continue to insist that financial institutions invest even more in their security and strengthen intelligence sharing (given that most financial institutions are linked through systems like Swift — the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) because the threat is growing and the techniques are becoming more and more sophisticated. Securing this sector can help curb the development of illegal activities that the stolen money finances, thereby contributing to the construction of a safer world.
Participating in the competition was a huge challenge, and it required me to stay motivated and consistently dedicate many hours of my time each week to it. At times it was really difficult, but overall it was a great experience. Aside from the prize and the position, I gained benefits that will prove valuable throughout my career, including a more thorough understanding of cybersecurity and the ability to take ownership of my learning and work autonomously.
The competition involves an extraordinary level of commitment. You need to stay very organized in terms of completing work on time and adhering to a strict, detailed schedule. You must read all instructions and meet strict deadlines, and you can’t be afraid to ask questions. Most importantly, have fun! I encourage all students who are passionate about IT or cybersecurity — anyone interested in finding ways to build a safer world — to participate in the Secure the Future competition. It may be one of the most challenging experiences of your academic career, but it could also be one of the most rewarding.
Discovering My Path
Neel Kattumadam, Software Engineering Intern
It may sound odd coming from someone who just finished a software engineering internship, but when I graduated high school, I wanted to be a doctor. I was accepted into UT Austin, and once I started college, however, I quickly realized that becoming a doctor was a fantasy, because it wasn’t my love for medicine that made me want to pursue that career. As corny as it may sound, what drew me to medicine was helping people with their problems and finding solutions for them. And that applied to technology as well as to medicine.
I had already been taking computer science courses, so I decided to pursue a career in that field. Once I graduated from UT Austin in May 2019, I started looking into graduate programs, and I was accepted into Carnegie Mellon University’s Master of Science in information systems program, which I began last fall. I went into the program most interested in data science, but the more courses in software engineering that I took, the more I liked it.
So when it came time to start exploring internships for the coming summer, I applied to a host of computer science internships, including the Palo Alto Networks program. Its focus on software engineering was appealing to me, and over the course of this three-month program, I’ve decided that this is the career for me.
In general, my team was working on projects that, in several ways, allow us to customize our products to suit the customers’ needs and their unique work setups. My work in particular involved creating a best practices assessment. I came in after the sale had been made and the customer was learning how to best use the product. I love interacting with customers, helping solve their problems, and optimizing their products to improve the way they work, so this was exactly the kind of thing I set out to do!
It never felt like work to me. I never felt like it was a grind to work three or four hours on a project — instead, it was more like, “Oh cool, now I can learn more about this!” I don’t think I’ve ever experienced that with any other subject.
Going Remote
Of course, when I applied and was accepted for this internship, my expectation was that I would return home to the Bay Area from Austin, TX, and work at Palo Alto Networks’ headquarters. But the coronavirus changed everything, and in March I was told that my internship would be done remotely. I left school and moved home to Saratoga, CA, and I spent the three months of my internship working from home.
Surprisingly, I loved working remotely. I enjoyed being able to structure my own day rather than arriving at a designated time. I’m not exactly a morning person, and if I’d had to go to the office, I would have had to wake up early and then sit in traffic for 30 to 45 minutes just to be there on time. But because I was working remotely, I was able to adjust the schedule so that I was at my best — starting my day a little later in the morning and working a little later into the evening. Not only that but I enjoyed having flexibility in my work environment. Sometimes I worked at my desk, sometimes at the kitchen counter with my mom. Sometimes I worked straight through, and sometimes I took a break and watched the news with my family. I think this flexibility allowed me to stay fresh.
Of course, it wasn’t always easy. I think going to work in an office is definitely the best way to network. I only knew three or four interns in my class, and that may have been my fault, because I immediately started flooding myself with work, and I didn’t hop on as many Zoom events as I could have. The face-to-face connections you make with peers when you’re in a workplace are really valuable, so if there’s one drawback to working remotely, I’d say that was it.
However, even though I’ve been remote the entire time, Palo Alto Networks’ human resources and recruiting services are 100% better than any I’ve seen at any other company. I had done an internship the previous year with a large, established, very well-known company, and during that time I only spoke to the recruiter a couple of times and was invited to a couple of socials at bars, things like that. But even being entirely remote with Palo Alto Networks, this was hands-down a better experience for staying connected.
Almost every day, there were opportunities to socialize and connect with each other, to hear speakers share their ideas and experiences, and to learn about new technologies or ways to improve the work we were doing. We even played interactive games using Kahoot or other apps, and the prizes were incredible — an Apple watch, gift cards to Amazon, and more. Gestures like this demonstrate that the company’s doing well, which is reassuring, but also that interns are worth that level of investment. There are numerous small groups that we were part of as well, and in my group, the Global Customer Support group, there was a team of about 15 interns who met every week to share common interests, compare experiences, or ask advice.
In fact, my internship experience was so positive that my manager was able to get approval to extend my internship, giving me the ability to work for Palo Alto Networks part time while I continue school. I would highly recommend this experience, both for the tremendous learning and professional experience you’ll get as well as for the connections you’ll make along the way.
Culture of Empowerment
Since I was a kid, when my parents gave me a MacBook, I’ve been interested in technology. From there, I fell down the rabbit hole — I knew right away I wanted to grow up to have a career in technology. I started out learning things like PhotoShop, then progressed to programming in high school, and now I’m in my last semester of my bachelor’s program in computer science at UT Austin. Once I got to college, I started looking for high-quality internships to prepare myself for the professional world of software engineering.
Cybersecurity always interested me, but I didn’t really see an overlap between it and software engineering until I found the Palo Alto Networks internship program. The program was three months long, from May through August, and my work was in NetDevOps, which is the intersection of networking and development operations that involves automating network design and changes.
Since I joined the team in May, I’ve been working with Panorama, our firewall management product, to create tooling for our firewalls in order to increase the transparency of how they’re managed. I write many supporting microservices and libraries in Python to interact with services like Okta, ServiceNow, Panorama, and databases. I’ve also automated some of this work through Jenkins or CI/CD pipelines.
Being in the midst of a pandemic, there was no other choice but to do the internship remotely. Fortunately, I was still able to do everything I needed to do from my home here in Prescott, Arizona. It was definitely a challenge, particularly in the beginning. I wasn’t sure how to get the support I needed when it seemed like everyone was so busy, and I couldn’t just walk over to ask for their assistance. That first week mostly involved ramping up, setting up my computer; figuring out how the team works and who provides approvals at what stages; and learning the goals and objectives. But soon I figured out how to navigate those issues and get the help I need, and it was really rewarding to be independent and find answers on my own. I also found that I really enjoyed the flexibility of working remotely. I would say one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned through my internship is how to work autonomously — to find or develop solutions on my own. I think that will serve me well in my career.
I started learning right away, and it hasn’t stopped. The interns here are constantly getting new projects to work on, and you have to learn quickly — though I find I’ve really enjoyed that fast pace. I also had previous internship experience, so I was familiar with having challenges thrown at me and having to push through my uncertainty and address them. Plus, speaking professionally, having that experience prepares me more for my career and will show future employers that I can work independently, think on my feet, and operate in a deadline-oriented environment.
Another thing I’ve learned that I have found tremendously valuable is proficiency in Python. Prior to this internship, I was self-taught but I’m very idiomatic in it now. Knowing it well and writing in it concisely is an important skill for the future.
Socializing and connecting with other interns as well as Palo Alto Networks employees has been a bit harder, obviously, because of the nature of remote work, but University Recruiting has put on some fun virtual events that have helped with that.
Even though I’ve been working on my own from home, I’ve definitely been treated as a member of the team, and my work has been meaningful and important. Just because I’m an intern doesn’t mean that I’ve been given menial tasks. In fact, a lot of my code has been used in important projects. In some companies, interns work in silos, removed from the teams, but I’ve been given assignments that were time-sensitive, where I’ve helped someone who was relying on my work to ship a big project. It was a little intimidating at first, but it was also really exciting to be contributing in a real way.
There’s a culture of empowerment here, and we’re all empowered to take on responsibilities and find solutions. Interns are encouraged to participate and complete projects with real stakes attached to them — not just meaningless, fluff jobs — and my code actually makes a difference. For me, that makes this the gold standard of internships.
And that leads me to another valuable lesson I’ve learned along the way, which is taking ownership of projects. I haven’t shied away from opportunities to learn and push myself. For example, our team uses remote contractors, and there have been times when they needed help clarifying spots in the code that were unclear or buggy, so I had to jump in and take ownership — identify places that needed improvement and take it upon myself to make those changes. In fact, I was strong enough in designing microservices that I got the opportunity to mentor another intern in that. So I’ve had a chance to both lead and follow during these three months, which doesn’t often happen during internships.
We’re exposed to people at all levels of the organization. We had an organization-wide intern fest, and we were on a call with high-level executives and the CIO, and I’ve even had some small group sessions with him. It’s really cool, and I’d never expected that from a big tech company like this.
Prior to this experience, I didn’t know what went into next-gen firewalls, and I honestly didn’t know much about what Palo Alto Networks did. But it’s been rewarding to see how all these things fit together, and I like that we’re doing something important — we’re securing companies, which is really exciting.
If I were to offer some advice to future interns, it would be this: Learn as much as you can, and don’t be afraid to ask questions, especially early on. It might seem like you’re being a nuisance, but no one expects you to know everything right away. Come in with a positive attitude, be open, and expect to learn a lot.
When Things Fall Into Place
I grew up in India and did my undergrad in Electronics and Communication engineering. I moved to the U.S. after graduating to pursue a master’s degree program in Electrical Engineering. I have always been fascinated with building things, and I began my career as an FPGA/ASIC design engineer. After a few years of doing that, what I realized was that while I enjoyed working on complex engineering problems, I also wanted to learn more about the business and customer-related aspects such as – why are we building this product? What customer problem are we trying to solve? Etc. To get exposure to these aspects, I decided to enroll in an MBA program at Dartmouth College. Through my MBA, I got exposed to a variety of different career paths and met people across various industries. But after doing two product management internships, I knew that I wanted to pursue a career in product management – I loved the fact that no two days are ever alike for a product manager (PM) and that there are always new things to learn. I also realized that I liked working at the intersection of business and technology problems.
It is interesting how I ended up at Palo Alto Networks. I had heard about how dynamic the cybersecurity space is, and I started looking into opportunities in the field. I came across a career posting for an early-in-career PM at Palo Alto Networks and decided to reach out to a few PM leaders in the company to learn more about the role. I sent a LinkedIn InMail to a Director of Product Management who in turn put me in touch with the hiring team. Things moved quickly from there, and within two weeks, I had an offer to join the company’s accelerated rotational product management program (Product Management Academy – PMA). It’s been a year since I joined Palo Alto Networks, and looking back, I believe it was meant to be. When you’ve found the right fit, things fall into place.
Reflecting on the last year
It’s incredible how quickly the time has flown by since I joined the program, yet I also feel I’ve gotten the opportunity to do so much in just a short time. During my first year at Palo Alto Networks, I focussed on building a Telemetry platform that helps our customers maximize the benefits they enjoy from the products and services that Palo Alto Networks delivers. As part of this, I got exposed to a lot of different aspects of being a PM such as working with UX and engineering teams to build a product, collaborating with marketing on positioning it, and creating field enablement content.
My most significant areas of growth through the year have been in developing critical thinking and soft skills. As someone who came from an engineering background, one of the learnings for me through the PM journey has been to become comfortable navigating through ambiguity. Because as a PM, you are discovering what is the real problem for the customers and then finding ways to solve it – so there is no set path to follow here. I learned how to go about breaking down large ambiguous problems into smaller consumable parts, how to validate assumptions for each of those parts, and figure out a way forward. Over the last year, I have also become comfortable acknowledging that “I don’t know something, but I will figure it out.” As a PM, there will be new things coming up, and there are going to be some areas that I know nothing about. It’s okay to acknowledge that and learn. That is where I think having a growth mindset helps!
Through the PMA program, I have also had a lot of opportunities to learn from senior leaders in the company. For example, we have had discussions with leaders on what are some best practices for developing a pricing strategy or aligning product development with go-to-market. And these discussions help me expand my horizon and learn from experts who have years of experience in these fields. To me, these learning opportunities are one of the biggest benefits of being in the PMA program. There is no straight path to becoming a successful PM – it is about learning best practices along the way and working on applying them, and the PMA program helps accelerate that learning. I also enjoy the diversity of our PMA cohort — we’re a small group, and all of us come from different backgrounds, but that means each of us brings something unique to the table, which makes for more robust interactions and innovation. We are always bouncing ideas off each other. Being able to share experiences and knowledge that way gives us a bird’s eye view of what’s happening across the company and helps us see how all these different products are stitched together in a much deeper way than we realized.
The PMA program is a rotational program, with our second year pushing us to challenge ourselves more and drive more significant impact. I am excited to see what the next year brings! Because Palo Alto Networks is continually evolving and growing, I don’t think there will ever be a time when I’m not learning at this company. I think as a PM, you want to be in a place where you’re looking on the horizon and seeing new things happening. I feel I have that here.
Trailblazing
Rohan Kar, Product Management Academy
My Journey to Product Management
As a 90s kid in India, I vividly remember life pre-Internet, when Amazon was just a river, Google search didn’t exist, and you needed an actual paper map to travel. Contrasting that with the vast improvements in my life that came after, started a lifelong passion for technology as a catalyst for positive change in the world.
So when it came to deciding a career path, I wanted to get as much exposure as I could into building great technology products. When you simplify it, three things determine a successful product: what you build, how you build it, and how it’s adopted. Product management is the only role that’s deeply embedded in all three areas.
I was naturally inclined to major in computer science and engineering for my undergrad. While I was strong in software development, I wanted to develop myself into a more well-rounded technologist. So I moved to the U.S. to pursue a Master of Information Management and Systems (MIMS) at the U.C. Berkeley School of Information. Berkeley provided an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the societal impact of my decisions on how technology is designed, built, and used.
As my mentor AJ likes to say, product management is both art and science. The art is all about situational leadership, influence, and the ability to drive outcomes despite imperfect conditions. Science is the technical knowledge and analytical skills you bring from areas within product development, like UX research, systems design, and data science, as well as areas outside product development like sociology, economics, and operations. PMs don’t necessarily make all the decisions — they just ensure the right ones get made. One’s ability to make better product decisions is ultimately limited by the scope of understanding of your problem space. So I think the more perspectives you bring into product management, the more you get out of it.
It was really important to me to be a part of a company that does well and also does good. I had always admired Palo Alto Networks as one that was working on the cutting edge and also making a difference in the world by keeping everyone digitally safer. When I encountered the PMA job listing on Berkeley’s internal careers site, I was immediately excited and applied right away. That’s how it all started!
About the PMA
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.
Each year, the PMA welcomes a small class of six to eight PMs. The close community aspect is one of the most important things to me about it because we all support and learn from each other. Not only that, but the mentorship I’ve received from product leaders throughout Palo Alto Networks has been tremendous, and it was an important part of why I chose the program.
There’s really no prescribed path to a successful product management career. Everyone creates their own through their unique backgrounds and experiences. In a way, we’re all trailblazers! If you’ve realized product management is the right role for you, then I think the PMA is a fantastic way to start. We move very quickly and at a high level, so you have to be ready to hit the ground running. It will accelerate your growth and allow you to take the next step towards becoming a product leader.
In my first rotation, I was placed on one of our most successful products: WildFire. I’ve enjoyed the full spectrum of opportunities working across the company to strategize key areas for business growth, writing specs for new features, defining key performance indicators (KPIs) for the next stage of my product, and helping deliver a platform to general availability (GA). When I took the job as Palo Alto Networks’ first PM in the PMA, I couldn’t have imagined the professional fulfillment I would achieve just in this past year alone.
Working at Palo Alto Networks
A huge draw for me joining Palo Alto Networks was the scale at which our products affect customers. As the world’s leading cybersecurity company, we help protect over 70,000 organizations, who then serve millions of people like us around the world. We are customers of our customers. By protecting them from adversaries, we, in turn, protect our own digital way of life. The benefits of working for an industry-defining company where you can grow and try new things is invaluable. It’s still early days for us so I’m constantly excited about what we do next.
Inside the Big Data Team
As the Director of Engineering in the Cortex Data Lake organization at Palo Alto Networks, I am working in some of the most interesting and challenging areas of technology today. Our team, which totals more than 20+, is composed of professionals who perform a variety of work, including Development Engineers, Site Reliability Engineers, Software Quality Testing Engineers, Product Managers, Program Managers, and more. We’re all focused on ingesting a massive amount of data in the data lake — roughly 3 million data requests per second at peak, which is on the high end of the industry. We provide real-time streaming data, and queries to our customers and internal apps for analytics, machine learning, and effective rapid security responses. It’s our job to ensure that the data are delivered on time with low latency and that the quality of that data remains good.
This is my first role in cybersecurity. I’ve worked in Big Data for eBay and LinkedIn, which are both consumer-based systems with high volume, but Palo Alto Networks is an enterprise-based company, meaning that the volume of data is much higher, and the way we use the data and work with customers is different. Instead of being used to make marketing decisions, this data helps us determine where a company’s vulnerabilities are and what potential threats they face. People typically don’t associate Big Data processing with security, but in fact, they do connect. We’re using artificial intelligence and machine learning to make the data more intelligent — these are tools used to analyze human behavior but we’re leveraging it for security purposes. For me, the combination of these things makes this a very interesting place to be, and I feel I’ve joined the right company.
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. We use Java heavily, as well as Kafka for temporarily storing data, and a number of other cutting-edge technologies, all to ensure that we’re handling enormous amounts of data in the most secure way possible, to provide the most value for our customers. This company is a pioneer in firewall technology and is a growing player in cloud-based security, so this is a chance for someone to explore technology from a whole new perspective.
This is not work we perform in isolation. We communicate with each other frequently, within the team and with others outside our team, to solve problems and develop new products, and the communication channels are always open at all levels in the organization, all the way up to the Senior Vice President, who is actually very involved and supportive of what we do. Not only that but we also work directly with our enterprise customers — upwards of 5,000 of them — to ensure we’re addressing their issues properly. We do presentations for customers and other departments within the company as well. Anyone who works within the Cortex Data Lake team should be comfortable communicating with others on a regular basis.
The people I work with and I all feel motivated when we walk into work every day. We see new things happening every day, new challenges to meet, and we truly want to improve and grow. We’re excited by the importance of the work we’re doing, and anyone who’s looking to join this team should be excited to embrace that. Whether you’re coming in with nothing but training in Java or basic and looking for an entry-level position or you are a senior-level architect with strong skills in streaming and Big Data and are prepared to mentor junior engineers, this growing team needs motivated people at all levels who are ready for the challenges of Big Data in a security environment.
Product Junkie
I come from a fairly conservative region in India. Growing up, I was always interested in pushing boundaries and breaking stereotypes. I married outside my community. I learned to drive a Jeep when I was 16, even though I could not do an elegant stick shift change. I earned a postgraduate degree in computer science. These were all things that girls in my family just did not do 20 years ago.
However, my father’s job as a government servant meant we had to move every two years or so. This helped me later in my career because it taught me to be adaptable and open to possibilities — to bloom where I’m planted. Because of this, I found myself in a career I love (but never planned for): leading a Product Management team for Palo Alto Networks.
My Career Journey
It was serendipitous that I ended up in cybersecurity. Unlike the college students I meet today, who are very clear about what they want, I didn’t know all the possibilities that existed in cybersecurity. I always knew I wanted to work with computers, and at that time, computer science education was just taking off, so I earned a degree in computer science, graduating in 2001. At the beginning of my career, in 2002, it was during the economic downturn, so I took the first interesting, available position I could find in my field, working as a Windows kernel developer for a technology startup. This was in a country where financial security is highly prized, and where women didn’t join risky startups. I had no experience in kernel development at the time, but I really loved technology, so this gave me an opportunity to get deep into solving problems with technology. Most of the time, I would be the only woman in late-night hacking sessions with my team. It required a lot of hard work, self-study, and running new pieces of code in windows kernel (mostly undocumented). I was so passionate about it that I was willing to do whatever I had to do and always saw the positive side — even when there was failure involved. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I eventually came to learn that if you want to make a difference in work, and in life, a growth mindset helps!
When the startup grew, it was time for the company to have a customer success team. I was expecting my daughter at the time, and in India, it’s considered more proper for women who are in the family way to work in less-stressful roles, so I was asked to leave engineering, which was perceived as more stressful, and heads up this new department which is perceived as less stressful. Even though I sort of fell into this new assignment, I learned that customer success was something I really enjoyed. It gave me an opportunity to build a team from scratch, which was very exciting but also to fully understand how the products worked and how customers were using them — and what their needs were. This would become key to my work as a Product Manager, a career I had increasingly become drawn to while working in customer success because I was interested in the connection between customers’ needs and product development.
In 2016, Rishi Bhargava, my former coworker from the startup where I’d begun my career, suggested that I come to work as a Product Manager for the company he had cofounded — Demisto, a pioneer in Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) products. Joining Demisto has been a pivotal point in my career. In this role, I worked on a very early product version with customers to discover how they used the product and what they needed from our product in the future. My team and I would bring our customers’ needs to our engineering team to translate that into our next generation of products.
Demisto’s product is exceptional and serves a key need in the Security Operations domain, so it’s no surprise that we were acquired by Palo Alto Networks (and rebranded as Cortex XSOAR).
So although I sort of happened into product management and my current role at Palo Alto Networks, I believe I’m exactly where I should be. There is no typical day. You have to be fluid, adaptable, and willing to deliver what your customers, the Sales department, your leadership and your team need from you. Fortunately, my upbringing and professional experience prepared me well for this!
Keys to Success
Now that I’ve been a Product Manager for several years, I see that there are several qualities a person should have to be successful. First, you have to be a product junkie — and I definitely am! I explore several products a week, which I believe is critical to success in this role. Nothing compares to the hands-on learning experience of what makes or breaks a great product. Working in a product like Cortex XSOAR, which integrates with an ecosystem of 300+ security products, is a great environment for learning new category of products.
I also think you must be passionate about customer success. I love working with customers, and I have developed a powerful empathy radar. I call it “customer sense” The most important things that customers have to tell you is what they’re not saying, so you have to sense these things.
Career Growth
What’s so exciting about working for Palo Alto Networks is that we are moving at incredible speed, trying to do things no one else is doing. We’re not about the status quo. There is no better security company to work for. There’s so much product DNA here, so much cutting-edge technology that we work on. The leaders here are deeply involved and open to new ideas. The possibilities for product development and a person’s career growth are vibrant. There is a lot of support for leadership development with coaching and abundant training resources.
When I was growing up, I wasn’t shown many career options — women in technology simply didn’t have that many. That’s why I’m passionate about helping others, particularly women, understand the options that product management can offer when there is interest. I work hard to bring young women along with me as I progress in my career. I make it a point to spend time mentoring women interested in transitioning to a product management career in cybersecurity. I regularly volunteer with organizations such as Girls Who Code, to introduce girls, including my daughter, to the many possibilities in the technology field.
If you have questions about Product Management opportunities at Palo Alto Networks, or about how to break into this field, I’d be happy to speak with you! Feel free to contact me at nrustagi@paloaltonetworks.com.
In the Driver’s Seat: Exploring Product Management
Before joining the Product Management Academy (PMA), I was enrolled in Stanford’s Ph.D. program, working in the robotics and autonomous motion planning field. I was excited to be working in a revolutionary technology space; after all, who doesn’t love robots? However, while I enjoyed the technical difficulty and cutting-edge nature of the work, I felt like I was inexplicably missing something.
Around the same time, by the pure chance of a friend’s recommendation, I decided to take a product management (PM) course at Stanford. That’s when the light bulb turned on. I loved influencing and shaping a product’s direction. I loved listening to users and hearing their experiences. But, most importantly, I loved collaborating with people — lots and lots of different people. With that Archimedean sense of revelation, I began rethinking my career path and started applying for product management jobs in leading technology fields.
In another stroke of good luck, I happened to run across a Palo Alto Networks interviewer at a data science career fair at Stanford. When I told him that I was more interested in product management, his eyes lit up, and he began telling me about this “new accelerated rotational program” the company was offering to put young PM candidates in control of important cybersecurity products and problems. Admittedly, at the time, I knew very little about the cybersecurity space. I had heard about the company from a friend in cybersecurity research and knew not much else. However, after returning home and doing some research, I realized the importance of the field (the very safety and security of our digital footprints!) and the impact Palo Alto Networks was having on it. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, I had joined Palo Alto Networks’ PMA.
Now in month 10 as a PM, I can safely say that I really enjoy product management! While it isn’t as “technically” challenging as my Ph.D. work, it forces me to use other and more creative parts of my brain to get the job done: on-the-spot negotiating, removing obstacles by whatever means, and generally acting as a Swiss Army knife. Being able to say, “I drove the execution of this feature because metrics/reasons X, Y, Z show that this feature will have the most value for the customer,” is not only exciting, but also fulfilling. Seeing the improved customer experience due to the feature reminds me that a PM’s impact is real and observable.
As I’ve learned through my work experience, soft skills are a big component of product management. They’re critical for leading discussions with stakeholders and customers, distilling problems into their key components for long-term product guidance, and firefighting the new problems each day brings. However, in my view, self-learning and leadership are the most important traits for PM’s (yeah, yeah, I know — everyone says it). But to put it in perspective, during my first rotation, I was assigned to the virtual firewall team, which essentially delivers the Next-Generation Firewall in virtual form for more flexible deployments (for example, cloud environments or generic computing platforms). When I joined, I hardly knew anything about the product or the space — I had to learn about networking, what a packet was, what virtualization is and why it’s important, how VM-Series works and differentiates itself from its competitors… the list goes on. Luckily, I had my peers, the Internet, and the program to help me catch up. It can be a long, uncomfortable learning process (I only started feeling confident in my contributions after seven months!) — but then again, I believe it’s that discomfort that forces you to grow and become the best product manager (or anything, really) you can be.
Overall, I’d highly recommend my experience as a product manager. And for those interested in product management, I’d highly recommend the PMA as well! The program does a great job of providing workshops (e.g., PM skills, leadership, presentations, etc.), connections to different leaders and groups in Palo Alto Networks, and, more importantly, high-visibility and high-impact projects. These one-year rotations are no joke — I’ve already launched a partnership program, worked on cross-product integrations, driven features, written problem statements, and handled a few customer escalations — to name a few things. While we may have been inexperienced when joining, we were expected to perform at the senior product manager level sometime during the rotation (but within reason — the people are nice and understand there’s ramp-up!)
So give it a try! Maybe PMA is the right program for you.
On the Big Data Frontier
Abhishek Joshi, Director of Data Engineering – Cortex
As the director of engineering on Palo Alto Networks’ Cortex Data Lake, I oversee multiple teams that collect and analyze enterprises’ security data to identify and block potential threats through our Cortex Apps. Our primary function is ingestion, which is the heart and soul of any Big Data platform. This team is where the magic happens. From scaling to billions of logs per day to making sure that we are available and successfully running in multiple geographies around the world and are able to process data from disparate sources — including IoT devices, firewalls, and any other sensors deployed — this is the team that makes it happen. We make sense of all that security and threat data to give meaningful insights to our end customers.
Many people who are familiar with the name Palo Alto Networks assume that we’re in the networking space, or they know that the company started in firewalls, so they think of us as purely a firewall company. But in truth, we’re on the bleeding edge of the data world, working on the latest and greatest technologies that you can find within computer science. From a technology perspective, this is as exciting as it gets!
My Path to Palo Alto
I grew up in India and earned an undergraduate degree in computer science at the University of Mumbai, then I relocated to the United States to complete my master’s in computer science at North Carolina State University. I worked in a number of software engineering roles and wrote quite a lot of code for the cloud portion of the industry, eventually rising through the ranks to earn management roles.
A former coworker approached me about working for Palo Alto Networks. He was working here and was really enthusiastic about the company and the leadership, and it was clear to me that it was the right fit for me. Breaking ground and pursuing a vision was in its DNA. They were doing things no one else was doing.
When I first joined this team last year, we were working around the clock to get a first version of our product out. We had made some promises in terms of the numbers we were planning to hit, and we were a bit behind the 8-ball. A bunch of us were in the “war room,” just burning the midnight oil, literally making things happen. Fast-forward to today, and we have a V1 product that has been on the market for months and has scaled to roughly 1.5 million logs per second, and now we’re excited to see that hard work come to fruition and know that what we do really matters. As a leader, I think that’s the most exciting part: to see something we built together and know that it actually works and makes a difference.
Playing on Our Team
From a people-management perspective, I make it a point to hire people who are smart and intelligent, yet humble. Humility actually plays a big role with respect to the team I run because I want to ensure that everyone is getting to learn and grow every single day.
Life at Palo Alto Networks is very focused and outcome-driven. We’ve set clear, measurable goals, and we’re not afraid to push boundaries. The goals are not unreasonable, and as a member of the team, you get a chance to participate in establishing them, but once they’re set, you are the master of your own destiny. So we want people who want to come in and make an impact within a reasonable amount of time and who aren’t afraid to try something new and even risk failure in that process. This is not a legacy product that we’re simply maintaining — we’re building it from the ground up. We’re blazing new trails. And we get to do it with a technology stack that is, bar none, the most comprehensive and exciting in the industry. So for someone who’s starting out in their career, I can’t think of a better opportunity.
The Unexpected Advantages of Working at Home
I am Senior Manager SQA (Software Quality Assurance) Engineer for our Cortex XDR group and I’ve been at Palo Alto Networks for almost 2 years. My wife, Maya Kats, is a Head Nurse (with a capital “N”!) in charge of the Neurology Department but since COVID-19 her responsibilities have shifted to a supervisor role at Assuta Ashdod Hospital to support COVID-19 patients.
This is the first time, as an adult, married with children, that I am lucky enough to spend more than a straight week at home with my family. With two kids who are 9 and 12, the routine is much more complicated and since my partner is going into work, I get to be in charge most of the days. There are many unexpected advantages during this period and I’ve realized that this is probably a once in a lifetime experience.
We didn’t manage to arrange the home office in time, so usually, it’s a sofa in my backyard or sometimes in my bedroom. I don’t want to lock myself in some room, it feels too claustrophobic, so I like having some space where I can work.
Between what feels like endless Zoom meetings that are interrupted by “Dad, I want to eat,” or “Dad, I’m bored, let’s play,” I’ve found that what works for me is not splitting up my time into work hours and home hours, it’s combining the two and balancing both responsibilities throughout the day. For me, I’ve found that it’s very important and efficient to connect over Zoom (the closest thing to an in-person conversation considering the current situation) versus connecting over emails or Slack messages.
I’ve learned, or to be more precise, I was reminded that my biggest problems and complaints are minimal compared to real-life problems and what my wife deals with on a daily basis at her job. I’ve realized that I am capable of many things I never imagined I could do by myself. Since COVID-19, cybersecurity now more than ever is important, and in many ways, the work has become more intense. However, my team has shown again that they are a very responsible, committed, and hardworking group of people, who are striving to get the best results in spite of so many obstacles. And last but not least I’ve learned that our Tel Aviv site is capable of doing anything and everything we decide to accomplish.