Palo Alto Networks

Dynamic, fast-moving organization.

Awesome brand in security.

Stock performing well.

Good benefits.

A totally top-down organization, and each tier of management seems to just parrot the VP-level initiatives down the management chain with no scrutiny of policy and strategic initiatives. There's no formalized means of feedback from the bottom up.

There is lots of new tech to learn about, due to the endless platform evolution through acquisition. However, technical enablement is not well structured, with countless learning initiatives coming from all directions. There seems to be no centralized provision of a coherent enablement program and no single point of time-accounting for the endless learning/training requirements.

Lots of pointless non-technical "must-do" internal activities that take us away from selling. The training and development side of the role is starting to seriously eat into customer-facing time and selling time. Is that really where we want to be as an organization?

Make the senior technical management something more than just robotic enforcers of metrics. It's all about leadership.

Scott's departure seems to have left the sales engineering side of the org feeling rudderless.

Quit enforcing things like mandatory certification. As the company has changed over the years, this has now become an irrelevance. The huge amount of time spent on that would be better spent learning how to do an awesome demo of Cortex-XDR, XSOAR, or learning about our competitors, etc. etc. – activities that actually make a difference to revenue.

If you think that we need constant sales training, why did you hire us in the first place?

Take a reality check on the above points. We all want to push up the stock price and see the organization succeed, but there now seems to be a growing list of obstacles in achieving that.