Principal, Netsec Product Strategy

Company Description

** This role is based in our Santa Clara CA headquarters with a hybrid working schedule of at least 3 days/week in office. ** 

At Palo Alto Networks® everything starts and ends with our mission: Being the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life. 

We envision a world where each day is safer and more secure than the one before. These aren’t easy goals to accomplish — but we’re not here for easy. We’re here for better. We secure our 85,000+ customers through industry-leading threat research and intelligence, a complete portfolio of best-in-class product innovation, plus expert services to help organizations at every step of their transformation journey. 

We are the world’s security leader, a company built on the foundation of challenging and disrupting the way things are done, innovating ahead of threats, and redefining what it means to be “secure”. 

We’re looking for innovators and risk-takers who are as committed to shaping the future of cybersecurity as we are. Are you up for it? 

Job Description

Your Career

The Netsec Product Strategy Principal role is critical to accomplishing our mission, working with our product and cross-functional leaders to develop effective product strategies. You will also track key industry and competitive trends and educate, shape and incubate ideas to feed the strategic planning process. Lastly, you will leverage your operational/executional mindset to facilitate the translation of Strategic plans into Strategy Deployment Initiatives. It is a highly visible role and an ideal entry point for future growth within Palo Alto Network.

The successful candidate will be very clear-minded, inventive, collaborative, data driven and able to see trends before they happen. You’ll bring deep experience in interfacing with Product and Engineering teams and help develop our forward-looking product strategies with the product leaders, providing enough tension on the process to ensure a great outcome, yet collaboratively to arrive at unified proposals.

Your Impact

• Develop a strong technical foundation in the products and services we currently have as the basis for defining our future direction

• Engage with external business and industry experts to learn and influence business strategies, constantly- remaining alert and forward-thinking about opportunities and risks in the industry

• Identify top growth areas to continue to drive industry leading growth and stay ahead of the competition

• Work closely with the product area and cross-functional leaders on specific product strategy initiatives to define where we want to go and how we get there

• Understand customer challenges and problems that need to be solved, and how our approach will be best/ uniquely positioned to  solve those problems

• Support and help drive business analysis on existing products to identify strengths and opportunities

• Leverage clarity in thought to effectively structure and communicate our strategies and plans to get approval from exec-staff on a path forward

• Serve as a close advisor to the Product Leadership team to ensure progress in critical areas

Qualifications

Your Experience 

• MBA graduate from a top-tier B- school or similar academic credentials or “direct promote” in Consulting

• Required direct product strategy experience in-top-tier consulting at the Principal / Associate Partner level (McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Deloitte, etc.)

• Must have deep understanding of typical enterprise tech products, pricing and business models within Networking or Cyber Security markets

• A track record of consistently developing and executing Product Strategies all the way from defining where to play, what to build, how to build and NPI process

• Leadership ability with experience interfacing with Product and Engineering is a must

• Executive presence and ability to engage with senior leadership in a constructive and collaborative manner and experience driving decisions and outcomes through influence

• Effective Program Management skills, with demonstrated ability to lead complex strategic initiatives

• Self-starter who wants to own and deliver the outcomes

Additional Information

The Team

The Netsec Strategy team works at the heart of Palo Alto Networks. The team tackles cross-functional strategic initiatives across all parts of our Netsec organization and across all functions. We take on the most challenging and mission-critical initiatives to drive and support our industry-leading growth and overall trajectory. We work on projects that have C-Leve