Cybersecurity Career Q&A: 5 Questions With Dana Gilboa, SVP Product at Armis

Note to readers: This blog post is part of the Armis cybersecurity career Q&A series where we explore how people advance their careers in the industry by spotlighting some of the talented people that make Armis the leader in unified asset intelligence and security.

In this Q&A blog post, we meet Dana Gilboa, SVP Product at Armis. Dana started her career as a developer in R&D, but her interests in and passion for improving the experiences of clients led her to the product management world. Dana is a proud mother of three who enjoys reading and cooking.

Question 1: As a Senior Vice President Responsible for Product, What Does Your Role at Armis Entail?

I run the product management organization at Armis. We are responsible for understanding our clients’ challenges and the market needs, defining innovative solutions to solve those issues, and then overseeing execution to ensure we are actually solving problems. We also collaborate with the rest of Armis, especially our sales and marketing teams, to bring new solutions to market successfully, and with the Armis Customer Success organization to assure product adoption and customer satisfaction.

I’m still relatively new to Armis, but I joined as we were launching our Asset Vulnerability Management [AVM] module so it’s been an exciting time. AVM adds a new layer to the robust organizational asset map Armis builds, tying vulnerabilities to underlying assets and enabling business-criticality-based prioritization and management.

Question #2: How Did You Get Into Product Management?

I actually started in research and development (R&D) as a developer, and then I moved to different management roles within R&D. Throughout those different roles, I always found a special interest in understanding the user, the problem, and the functional aspects of the solution in addition to the code and technical architecture, so I took a chance and moved to product management, and the rest is history.

Question #3: Do You Have Advice for Someone Just Getting Started on Their Career Path?

I think that you should listen to yourself and carefully consider what you’re interested in and good at. For example, if you start in R&D like I did, the standard career path is usually technical. But I think you should be true to yourself and pursue what gets you excited and keeps you going and use your foundational skills, whether they are technical or something else, to bring additional value to your role.

The great thing about product management is that because it oversees the entire product life cycle, it’s a holistic practice requiring skill sets from across different domains. So you can get involved from a variety of angles, including the user experience, marketing, or even sales or customer success where you build invaluable knowledge interacting closely with clients and learning about their challenges. I actually know a great product manager who was a lawyer in a previous life.

Question #4: What Does Armis Mean to You?

To me, Armis is about continuously identifying and understanding customers’ needs and building the best products to cater to those needs. And I think our teams have a genuine passion for doing that which results in excellence in execution. Working in open collaboration with brilliant, passionate people that strive for excellence makes work fun.

Question #5: What Do You think the Key is to Attract More Women and New Perspectives to Cybersecurity?

I think we should stop flattening an entire domain to just “cybersecurity” because I think it’s a word that people relate to a few super-genius geeks fighting hooded hackers. And cybersecurity is way more than that; it’s a huge domain with a wide variety of job roles. So I think it’s important to educate people, and especially girls and women, about the different roles within cybersecurity, what challenges they entail, and what skillsets are needed to thrive in them. And then I think many more people would be able to relate to it and find it interesting.

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