Inverted Product Management Podcast #1: Introduction to Inverted Product Management

Jeroen Kemperman (0:05)

Hello, everybody. Welcome to this first edition of the Inverted Podcast. And we started this podcast because we know that people working in security, abuse, identity face a totally different world from people working on standard products, if you can even call products standard, and everything is different. And so we wanted to start a podcast where we just share what we've learned over the many years working in security, identity, some abuse, to help those of us that are working in this area to just have a higher impact, and to help those who are managing people that work on inverted products to have a better life. But before we start, we want to do a quick intro of everybody that's here. Obviously, you can find us all on LinkedIn, so we'll make it short. But I'll start with Dario. Why don't you give the audience a quick introduction?

Dario Salice (0:57)

Yeah, sure. Yeah, my name is Dario Salice. I'm a recovering product manager. I spent a few years in companies like Google, where I met Jeroen, and Facebook, working in product roles where I was responsible for a variety of types of problems around identity, authentication, account hijacking, compromise, impersonation, things like that. Last two and a half years, I've been working on my own as an independent advisor, consultant in this space. And yeah, the thing that fascinates me really, and has never let me go about this space is, being an inverted product manager means you have to own a problem and not a solution. Because the problem stays static, but the solution moves around as the adversarial behavior changes.

Jeroen Kemperman (1:51)

Yeah, we are going to talk a lot about that today, Dario, about the problems. I wanted to quickly move on to Dana also. Dana, we've known each other for some time.

Dana Kaufman (2:02)

Yes. Yes. How are you guys doing today? I am Dana Kaufman. I'm joining you from beautiful Walla Walla, Washington. And I have been in the industry for a long time. I started in financial companies and technology, and then did some startups and launched some successful startups, and then went to enterprise computing. And then the bulk of my time, though, and in the most recent time, has been in product management and identity security, which is where I met all these gentlemen. And I specialized in kind of advanced detections, data science, a lot of ML-driven, AI-driven detections and preventions.

And the largest part of my career was spent at Microsoft, and I worked and led the Entra or Azure AD, depending on when you use the products, identity protection products. So I was the lead product management for that. And now I'm semi-retired, and these guys dragged me out of the semi-retirement to discuss the security product PM role, which is something I'm pretty passionate about.

Jeroen Kemperman (3:31)

So cool. And Tom?

Tom Williamson (3:34)

Yeah. Also, adding a little bit to our international flavor, like Jeroen, I'm based in Zurich, Switzerland, although unfortunately not Swiss, or at least not yet. And I come to the industry and to my position from a different kind of background, I think, from you guys, which also brings a little bit of a different perspective, right? So, you know, from an academics perspective, I studied a lot of law in my time.

I've worked as a corporate lender in financial services, but that's now very distant in my past. I've come up professionally in within the identity and security sphere, mostly as a, initially as a project manager, then as a product owner, owning some of Dana's fine work in Swiss Financial Services, working on spinning up Entra and Active Directory, making them more secure, but also trying to make use of all of the fine new features that are being foisted on us by Microsoft. And then more recently, I took a move into consulting about two years ago, where I lead the identity practice for one of the large consultancies here in Switzerland. And I think just in terms of the whole Inverted PM journey and also what makes me passionate and interested about identity specifically as a security discipline is above all other types, I think of kind of security engineering, product management, product development, it is the one that deals more frequently or most frequently with the human problem, the human factor, the human element of how we kind of keep enterprises and data secure, and the endless creativity both of attackers and also generally well-meaning but potentially ignorant end users who will find a way around all of our various protections and controls, making a smooth path for them while keeping them secure is just an endless but fascinating problem.