Raaz Herzberg
Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Product Strategy at Wiz
Where to hear and read about Raaz Herzberg1 episode or test
Raaz Herzberg is Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Product Strategy at Wiz, a former engineer and product manager who joined as one of its first employees. The thing most worth learning from her is to ignore polite interest, follow real customer pull, and then say plainly and boldly what you do.
You will never know your limit if you don't try.
Building Wiz: the fastest-growing startup in history | Raaz Herzberg (CMO and VP Product Strategy)
Raaz Herzberg: the story and the lessons
1Raaz Herzberg's path from engineer to Wiz CMO
Herzberg moved from engineer to product leader to marketing chief. Before Wiz she led security products at Microsoft, including Azure Sentinel. At Wiz she was one of the first seven or so employees and the first product manager, then VP of product, then CMO.
She spent most of her career as a product manager and says she had a ton to learn about marketing when she moved.
She took the CMO job with no marketing background. Two and a half years in, sellers won every proof of value, but customers said they wished they had heard of Wiz before signing with a competitor. CEO Assaf asked her to lead marketing in a freezing server room.
She had never heard of a lead and did not know the word pipeline. She spent that weekend on podcasts and calls with CMOs, then agreed to try. She says she has no career plan and just follows good people.
Herzberg follows the heat and puts strong people where the blockage is. She describes the pressure point moving from product to engineering to sales to marketing as the company grew. When sellers asked for more pipeline because nobody knew Wiz, marketing became the bottleneck.
She says she naturally follows the heat.
She attempts roles she expects to fail at and ignores impostor feelings. Herzberg was sure she would fail as a product manager and as CMO, and took both anyway. Her rule is to feel the impostor feeling but not let it stop a decision.
Her mother taught her that friction builds skill. She pushed her shy daughter toward the areas where she was least confident, like brushing harder where there is blood on a tooth, and valued courage over talent.
2How Wiz found product-market fit by listening for pull
Wiz started as Beyond Networks, aimed at network security. The founders and first five engineers had all built cloud security products, yet the first idea was network security. The company was founded as COVID shut the world down and had only a deck, no product.
The CEO had led all of Microsoft's cloud security products, which gave the pitch weight.
The team ran 10 to 15 customer calls a day with CISOs. Lockdown meant busy executives were home and took back-to-back calls over Zoom. The volume exposed that the network security idea drew only polite interest.
Herzberg says many calls are how you find what is not working, and what is.
Herzberg treats polite interest as noise and looks for pull. Early calls ended with 'sounds interesting, we'd love to hear more'. After the pivot to cloud security, buyers asked about pricing, how long a POV takes, and who to connect Wiz to on their team.
She says founders have "a bias to look for affirmation, versus a bias to look for what you don't want to hear."
Her question 'what exactly are we building' triggered the pivot. After weeks of calls she still could not say what the product was and was sure she alone was confused. Asking for concrete details led to a five-hour founder discussion and the pivot to cloud security, six weeks after she joined.
Nobody had a clear picture. She now says 'I don't understand' many times a day and calls it her favorite question, but it only works if leaders are willing to rethink when someone says it.
She tested buyer commitment with a long technical questionnaire. When a Fortune 10 company asked for the first POV, Wiz had only the start of a product. Herzberg sent a long list of technical questions to learn what to build and to buy time, and it came back filled a day later.
She says a customer who does real work to get started proves they want it. She never pushes anyone into a POV: "I have to feel that want back."
Wiz founders sold and closed the first deals themselves. They closed contracts before they had a sales team and sold a couple of million in ARR before the first sales hire. This happened by accident, because demand moved faster than hiring.
Selling end to end gave the first seller a proven pitch. She calls bringing in an outsider to fix what the core group can't do wishful thinking.
Founder trust of about 22 years lets Wiz decide fast. The four founders worked together at Adallom, which sold to Microsoft, and served together in the Israeli army. Each owns a clear domain.
Herzberg says her own influence on strategy needed no fight, and she links that to the open culture.
3How Herzberg built Wiz's marketing
Herzberg uses marketing's low cost of failure to try bold things. A feature uses engineering time, can't be removed in B2B once a customer uses it, and must work with every other feature. Marketing has no maintenance or technical debt, so a flopped video is replaced the next day.
She says marketing is "quite the opposite" of product, and used that to make noise when nobody had heard of Wiz.
She turned the RSA booth into a Wizard of Oz show. Cyber booths are red, black and hoodies, so Wiz went for the opposite, with actors as Dorothy and others. Booth traffic was five times the previous year with the same space and spend.
Her goal was only to make people ask what Wiz is. She was scared walking onto the floor. Wiz now changes the booth theme every year.
Wiz dropped fear-based security branding for pink and bright blue. The tone is optimistic and focused on magic, chosen to stand out in a market that sells by frightening people.
She expected it could be a failure or a hit. She dislikes how most security companies market through fear.
Deep customer knowledge made up for missing marketing craft. Her first board meeting ever came two months into the role. She lives in cloud security as a customer, and her plan was to take chances and make a lot of noise.
Changes showed within those two months. She credits her team for teaching her marketing.
Herzberg learned marketing by reverse engineering brands she loves. She studied companies she admired and the people behind them, including Gong, and watched every talk its CMO gave.
She ignored whether they were in security. Her reading includes Danny Meyer's Setting the Table and Reed Hastings' No Rules Rules.
Herzberg doubts an outsider could succeed as CMO at Wiz. Marketing is highly visible, so one off-brand ad can break founder trust, which is slow to build and quick to break. An outsider lacks both founder trust and deep product and market knowledge.
The role also spans performance marketing, brand and design, and events, which barely correlate. As a product manager she knew whom to hire, but she lacks that network in marketing.
4Herzberg's rules for clear messaging
She writes everything as if the reader has never heard of Wiz. Herzberg calls it the dummy explanation. A phrase like 'Wiz Graph Database' fails because a normal person has no reason to know it.
"There's no reason to use complex terminology, when you can keep things straight and simple." She says the practice is a hard daily reminder that the team is in a bubble.
She uses the words buyers search for, not the category's jargon. Product teams call the category CNAP, but buyers Google 'cloud security solution'. Insiders using initials like CSPM leave a team remote from its buyer by accident.
"People are not Googling that word."
Product must hand marketing crisp signals, not gray ones. Product people can answer 'not exactly, but it can do this', and that blur gets lost when a message scales. Product marketing can only amplify what is black and white.
She only understood this after crossing to the go-to-market side.
She resists changing a headline just because the team is bored. The team tires of a color or website headline long before customers do. Customers are only learning what was put up ten months ago, and changing it moves things under their feet.
"You are the only one looking at this thing, day after day."
She says that if something feels too complex, it is probably wrong. Her advice is to step back, leave it, and return to find a simpler way, for product features and for life.
She ties it to the early Wiz idea that nobody could understand.
Building Wiz: the fastest-growing startup in history | Raaz Herzberg (CMO and VP Product Strategy)
Raaz Herzberg explains how Wiz found product-market fit by changing how it listened to customers, then used bold, low-cost marketing experiments to fix awareness. Wiz reached $100 million ARR in 18 months and now has over $500 million ARR.
Herzberg moved from engineer to product leader to marketing chief. Before Wiz she led security products at Microsoft, including Azure Sentinel. At Wiz she was one of the first seven or so employees and the first product manager, then VP of product, then CMO.
She spent most of her career as a product manager and says she had a ton to learn about marketing when she moved.
She took the CMO job with no marketing background. Two and a half years in, sellers won every proof of value, but customers said they wished they had heard of Wiz before signing with a competitor. CEO Assaf asked her to lead marketing in a freezing server room.
She had never heard of a lead and did not know the word pipeline. She spent that weekend on podcasts and calls with CMOs, then agreed to try. She says she has no career plan and just follows good people.
Herzberg follows the heat and puts strong people where the blockage is. She describes the pressure point moving from product to engineering to sales to marketing as the company grew. When sellers asked for more pipeline because nobody knew Wiz, marketing became the bottleneck.
She says she naturally follows the heat.
She attempts roles she expects to fail at and ignores impostor feelings. Herzberg was sure she would fail as a product manager and as CMO, and took both anyway. Her rule is to feel the impostor feeling but not let it stop a decision.
Her mother taught her that friction builds skill. She pushed her shy daughter toward the areas where she was least confident, like brushing harder where there is blood on a tooth, and valued courage over talent.
Wiz started as Beyond Networks, aimed at network security. The founders and first five engineers had all built cloud security products, yet the first idea was network security. The company was founded as COVID shut the world down and had only a deck, no product.
The CEO had led all of Microsoft's cloud security products, which gave the pitch weight.
The team ran 10 to 15 customer calls a day with CISOs. Lockdown meant busy executives were home and took back-to-back calls over Zoom. The volume exposed that the network security idea drew only polite interest.
Herzberg says many calls are how you find what is not working, and what is.
Herzberg treats polite interest as noise and looks for pull. Early calls ended with 'sounds interesting, we'd love to hear more'. After the pivot to cloud security, buyers asked about pricing, how long a POV takes, and who to connect Wiz to on their team.
She says founders have "a bias to look for affirmation, versus a bias to look for what you don't want to hear."
Her question 'what exactly are we building' triggered the pivot. After weeks of calls she still could not say what the product was and was sure she alone was confused. Asking for concrete details led to a five-hour founder discussion and the pivot to cloud security, six weeks after she joined.
Nobody had a clear picture. She now says 'I don't understand' many times a day and calls it her favorite question, but it only works if leaders are willing to rethink when someone says it.
She tested buyer commitment with a long technical questionnaire. When a Fortune 10 company asked for the first POV, Wiz had only the start of a product. Herzberg sent a long list of technical questions to learn what to build and to buy time, and it came back filled a day later.
She says a customer who does real work to get started proves they want it. She never pushes anyone into a POV: "I have to feel that want back."
Wiz founders sold and closed the first deals themselves. They closed contracts before they had a sales team and sold a couple of million in ARR before the first sales hire. This happened by accident, because demand moved faster than hiring.
Selling end to end gave the first seller a proven pitch. She calls bringing in an outsider to fix what the core group can't do wishful thinking.
Founder trust of about 22 years lets Wiz decide fast. The four founders worked together at Adallom, which sold to Microsoft, and served together in the Israeli army. Each owns a clear domain.
Herzberg says her own influence on strategy needed no fight, and she links that to the open culture.
Herzberg uses marketing's low cost of failure to try bold things. A feature uses engineering time, can't be removed in B2B once a customer uses it, and must work with every other feature. Marketing has no maintenance or technical debt, so a flopped video is replaced the next day.
She says marketing is "quite the opposite" of product, and used that to make noise when nobody had heard of Wiz.
She turned the RSA booth into a Wizard of Oz show. Cyber booths are red, black and hoodies, so Wiz went for the opposite, with actors as Dorothy and others. Booth traffic was five times the previous year with the same space and spend.
Her goal was only to make people ask what Wiz is. She was scared walking onto the floor. Wiz now changes the booth theme every year.
Wiz dropped fear-based security branding for pink and bright blue. The tone is optimistic and focused on magic, chosen to stand out in a market that sells by frightening people.
She expected it could be a failure or a hit. She dislikes how most security companies market through fear.
Deep customer knowledge made up for missing marketing craft. Her first board meeting ever came two months into the role. She lives in cloud security as a customer, and her plan was to take chances and make a lot of noise.
Changes showed within those two months. She credits her team for teaching her marketing.
Herzberg learned marketing by reverse engineering brands she loves. She studied companies she admired and the people behind them, including Gong, and watched every talk its CMO gave.
She ignored whether they were in security. Her reading includes Danny Meyer's Setting the Table and Reed Hastings' No Rules Rules.
Herzberg doubts an outsider could succeed as CMO at Wiz. Marketing is highly visible, so one off-brand ad can break founder trust, which is slow to build and quick to break. An outsider lacks both founder trust and deep product and market knowledge.
The role also spans performance marketing, brand and design, and events, which barely correlate. As a product manager she knew whom to hire, but she lacks that network in marketing.
She writes everything as if the reader has never heard of Wiz. Herzberg calls it the dummy explanation. A phrase like 'Wiz Graph Database' fails because a normal person has no reason to know it.
"There's no reason to use complex terminology, when you can keep things straight and simple." She says the practice is a hard daily reminder that the team is in a bubble.
She uses the words buyers search for, not the category's jargon. Product teams call the category CNAP, but buyers Google 'cloud security solution'. Insiders using initials like CSPM leave a team remote from its buyer by accident.
"People are not Googling that word."
Product must hand marketing crisp signals, not gray ones. Product people can answer 'not exactly, but it can do this', and that blur gets lost when a message scales. Product marketing can only amplify what is black and white.
She only understood this after crossing to the go-to-market side.
She resists changing a headline just because the team is bored. The team tires of a color or website headline long before customers do. Customers are only learning what was put up ten months ago, and changing it moves things under their feet.
"You are the only one looking at this thing, day after day."
She says that if something feels too complex, it is probably wrong. Her advice is to step back, leave it, and return to find a simpler way, for product features and for life.
She ties it to the early Wiz idea that nobody could understand.