In this “Meet the Team” Q&A, we talked with Maya Even-Shani, Director of Product Management.
Before Minimus, Maya held senior product leadership roles at cybersecurity companies including Palo Alto Networks, Twistlock, and Skybox Security. She has experience in enterprise security, from launching threat-centric vulnerability management products to building and leading global product teams. She brings deep expertise in cloud and Kubernetes security, with a passion for transforming complex problems into elegant product solutions.
Read on to learn what brought Maya to Minimus, how she explains what we’re building, and what she's learned leading product teams in some of the industry’s most innovative cybersecurity companies.
What brought me to Minimus was, first and foremost, the people. I know how very essential it is to have a good working relationship in order to ship a great product. I'm very excited about that because I think we have a wonderful team.
But beyond that, the actual product is truly exciting. I've been in the cybersecurity industry for many years now, and it's very rare that you find a product in which its value is so immediate and obvious. We're shipping container images with zero vulnerabilities to very few vulnerabilities, so it's a no brainer. Why would I not want that?
If I compare it to, say, I don't know, grocery delivery, why wouldn't I want my grocery delivery to be on time in a sealed container that I know that everything is fresh and everything is clean? Why would I want another option?
Since I’m so excited about the product, if I added a feature I’d say, let me connect to your networks, your clouds, your data centers—and let me show you how much you’re missing out by not deploying our images. Even if you deployed them in just one part of your environment, let me show you how much you could gain from it.
I basically take these high level ideas, features, or requests from customers and try to figure out what the best way to address them is. And that's actually a team effort. It requires a lot of conversations and iteration with R & D, product design, and marketing—various stakeholders are involved in it in order to see what the best solution is.
We’re very keen on making things intuitive, but we also want to make them helpful for customers. So there is a balance to keep. There are a lot of details involved, a lot of things to consider, and it requires a lot of working together to figure out the best answer. That's my role.
An overlooked part of product management is actually understanding the cost of building a feature. It's very easy to get caught up in excitement and say, “okay, let's do that. Let's add that.” And then it sort of becomes a clatter, or it's very hard to maintain. Everything has a cost, the maintenance cost, the writing cost, the support cost, the UI impact.
So while it's all very human to get excited and want to add more, you have to look ahead and figure out if it's aligning with what you want to do and what part of it is important. Sometimes less is more.
One example is how we originally thought about how to deliver all of the images available with the different versions. We started off with a certain UX element to do that, but it didn’t work well.
We went back and forth, but we landed on more of a timeline look, where you can scroll through versions, see where you are, and you have a coupling of the image with a view of the prod and the dev version together. It made much more sense.
There were several things like that, where we spent a bunch of time figuring out the best way to implement it.
There was also a lot of R & D work involved in figuring out the right infrastructure, so there were different angles, from engineering to product design. It was a critical element of the product, and it took collaboration to get it right.
Minimus gives you a faster, safer starting point—with container and VM images that have 95% fewer vulnerabilities than the ones you’re using today. Just drop them into your existing deployments and instantly shrink your attack surface—no code changes, no hassle. Try it today.
