Wiz's Product-Led, Customer-Obsessed Cloud Security Disruption

Key Quotes

"I always feel like an imposter every day it's part of the motivation I also think sometimes people think they know more than they know I'm never at that problem I always feel like I know probably less than they know and I'm never complaining about anything I'm always paranoid about everything I've kind of learned to embrace it I never feel confident I always feel like an imposter in every single thing I've done through my career whether I was well prepared not well prepared whether it was something that should have been a walk in the park or not I feel the same way."

Raaz Herzberg explains that he consistently feels like an imposter, which he views as a motivator rather than a hindrance. This feeling of knowing less than others and being paranoid about potential failures drives him to be diligent and avoid complacency in his career.

"I think wiz had an incredible product market fit early on meaning the value that the product brought to customers was very clear it was a combination of product market fit and also we were solving something that was a big problem it wasn't like a small problem for our customers like for customers for security teams there's a before wiz and an after wiz moment we're solving a big problem for them like we're solving cloud security if you're a security team and a dev team and you're building things in the cloud how do you secure them that's what we solved it's a big problem and the product had very strong product market fit and also from day one the product and i started as the first product manager so my first role at wiz was leading the product team we always believed that time to value is value and so the way wiz works is very fast meaning you connect to your environment and it's an enterprise security product so those things are expected to take months and months and months for deployments and things until you see value but in wiz literally you get value in like 15 minutes so things like a combination of having very short time to value being very easy to deploy and solving a very big problem like solving cloud security and wiz started at you know the beginning of covid so it was even a bigger problem than it ever was before because everybody were moving even faster to the cloud so it was a combination of all of those three things that just kind of made it roll much faster than we expected."

Raaz Herzberg attributes Wiz's early success to a strong product-market fit, solving a significant problem in cloud security, and a rapid time-to-value for customers. He highlights that unlike typical enterprise security products that take months to deploy, Wiz delivers value within minutes, a key differentiator that accelerated their growth, especially with the increased cloud adoption during COVID-19.

"I think for us the best marketing decision I've made early on was trusting my instincts about being out there with something super weird and unique the first decision I actually made after I took the marketing role already we had space in in rsa which is like the super bowl of cyber companies so it's like this huge conference where you pay a lot of money to get you know a booth so like 5 meters on 5 meters of something you paid like i don't know a ton of money to get that and we already had that space right and our problem at the time was that nobody's ever heard of us nobody heard of wiz although we had amazing product market fit that was the problem so I decided to be like okay i've been to this conference a gazillion times they spend most of my grant cyber security everything's like gray blue dark scary I said let's do a wiz of oz booth and make it super weird so the thing literally looked like wiz of oz it was like this big hot air balloon there was like a yellow brick stone and I paid some actors from san francisco to dress up like the wiz of oz characters and spend the day there you know compared to the price you pay for that small space it's nothing doing something yellow and weird doesn't cost more than doing it black and boring and bringing actors is like 400 a day so it wasn't more expensive but there was a chance of people being what is she doing like this is so weird and I was just coming into the role so a lot of people were looking at what I was doing inside the company because I've never done this before but like I just decided to roll with it I didn't ask a lot of people for their opinion I just rolled with it and we have the same size of space and place at that conference every year and it brought in like 4x more leads and everybody because everybody came to see what what is that company it didn't say anything except wiz of oz so I think that taught me a bit about not doing things the classic way trusting your gut not being afraid to be different and it taught me that lesson that that's okay in marketing it's not that okay in product by the way but in marketing it's fine because let's say that this booth would have been the weirdest thing ever okay I would have never done it again and people would have rolled their eyes at me but there's no harm there for good or something I'm not ruining something."

Raaz Herzberg recounts the "Wizard of Oz" themed booth at an RSA conference as his most impactful marketing decision, emphasizing the importance of trusting instincts and embracing uniqueness. Despite being new to the marketing role and facing potential skepticism, this unconventional approach significantly increased lead generation compared to traditional, "boring" booths, teaching him the value of differentiation in marketing.

"I think one of my biggest mistakes early on was that I had no real understanding of product marketing and its role I spent my career on the engineering and product side never on the go to market side and product marketing is this weird animal that's in between and being on the product side it was never sure I mean I almost thought of them as ignorantly right that was because I was ignorant about their role but I thought of them almost like the team that writes the blogs you know when you launch something that's really that was my perception and I couldn't have been more wrong and I joke about this today with my head of pmm chang which is incredible the smartest woman on this planet and she remembers the day I met her at wiz and at that point I was still on the product team I had nothing to do with marketing and I kind of asked her so your job is writing the blogs right that's what I was that was my perception of product marketing she felt the gap I couldn't have been more wrong and I've learned how much of an important function it is to bring something to market and I've been very humbled by being able to learn a lot from her as well about the role."

Raaz Herzberg admits his initial ignorance about the role of product marketing was a significant mistake, stemming from his product and engineering background. He initially perceived product marketing as merely writing blogs, a misconception he now recognizes as fundamentally wrong, highlighting the critical function of product marketing in bringing a product to market.

"I think brand is underrated meaning people spend a lot of time doing things that will impact a number on the board deck like pipeline numbers and having now