Technical Product Marketing

Melissa Sussmann

Translate complex, technical infrastructure into revenue-driving stories.

Technical product marketing leader with over a dozen years of success driving go-to-market across cybersecurity, SaaS, AI, and developer platforms.

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Work Experience

Career History

Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Cloud and Security

Kentik — Remote, USA

Aug 2025 – Present
  • Led go-to-market strategy, positioning, and messaging for Kentik’s cloud and security platform, translating complex observability, network security, and AI-powered telemetry into compelling narratives for platform engineers, SREs, security teams, and executive buyers.
  • Created unified platform positioning spanning network observability, DDoS detection, incident response, cloud networking, and AI-powered operations, enabling differentiated messaging across the security portfolio.
  • Developed technical sales enablement, technical marketing content, competitive battlecards, demos, webinars, and solution briefs that accelerate enterprise platform adoption and improve win rates.
  • Owned competitive intelligence across observability, cloud security, AI-driven operations, and network security platforms, delivering strategic positioning and objection handling against established and emerging competitors.

Staff Product Line Marketing Manager, Platform Security

Docker — Remote, USA

June 2024 – July 2025
  • Led platform product marketing and go-to-market strategy across Docker's security portfolio, including Docker Scout, Docker Hub, Docker Hardened Images, Verify, APIs, and ecosystem integrations.
  • Developed the platform narrative connecting software supply chain security, container security, AI-powered developer workflows, and enterprise platform adoption into a unified customer story.
  • Drove competitive differentiation, equipping sales with battle cards, training, and content to improve win rates.
  • Produced technical content including whitepapers, webinars, case studies, and blogs tailored for developer and security audiences.

Lead Technical Advocate (Technical Product Marketing)

Sumo Logic — Remote, USA

April 2022 – June 2024
  • Drove global awareness for AI-driven anomaly detection, Kubernetes, cybersecurity, and cloud infrastructure monitoring.
  • Developed comprehensive technical content, go-to-market strategies, persona development, use cases, and sales plays for internal and external sales enablement on our logs collection products.
  • Successfully increased brand visibility by driving our involvement in crucial industry reports from Gartner, OMDIA, GigaOm, Forrester, and more by providing extensive responses, presentations, demos, and other supporting materials.
  • Created technical content, product launches, demos, webinars, blogs, eBooks, and sales enablement supporting Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, GCP, EKS, AKS, cloud-native architectures, and enterprise security operations.

Senior Product Marketer, Tanzu Ecosystem

VMware Inc. — Remote, USA

Oct 2021 – April 2022
  • Created go-to-market strategy and sales motion for Ecosystem partners.
  • Created sales and training collateral for Tanzu for Kubernetes Operators personas, covering observability, compliance, and security DevOps use cases.
  • Launched global marketing campaign for a third-party services sales motion.

Technical Product Marketing Lead, Cloud Ops

Puppet Labs (formerly Reflect) — Vancouver, WA

Aug 2019 – Oct 2021
  • Managed a team of 5 contractors across web, SEO, technical writing, and dev advocacy to deliver content and marketing campaigns for a SaaS-based DevOps tool.
  • Managed global marketing budgets, created executive presentations for the parent company, and led company-wide planning and readiness for entry into the cloud-native market.
  • Led Relay's go-to-market motion from inception to launch, including strategy, website launch, and sales enablement execution. Additionally, engaged with our partners and developer community to conduct personas research and increase open-source contributions.

Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager

Advanced Micro Devices / AMD (formerly Xilinx) — Boulder, CO

March 2018 – May 2019
  • Drove the AWS partnership, Hardware as a Service (HaaS) engagement, and marketplace strategy for the first SaaS release at Xilinx (Vivado and SDx on AWS).
  • Created webinars, how-to documents, and technical training for developer products and Kubernetes plug-in.
  • Drove containerization and cloud-native strategy for developer tools.

Product Manager, Data Center Solutions and Software

Intel Corporation (now Altera) — San Jose, CA

Aug 2015 – March 2018
  • Organized and driven planner for all product launch activities, including product specifications, system-level design, white papers, reference designs, and technical marketing collateral.
  • Enthusiastic advocate for customer requirements such as ease of use and performance, ensuring alignment across product development and go-to-market strategy.
  • Spearhead for worldwide marketing strategies and product positioning that are executed globally and delivered according to corporate brand and business unit sales goals.
  • Built cloud and OEM redistribution strategy for data center cards integrated with Intel Deep Learning Inference Accelerator.
  • Drove strategic positioning for compression, storage, and data center solutions.
  • Mentored and supervised two incoming New College Grads in a rotation program

Marketing Engineer (New College Grad Rotation Program)

Intel Corporation (now Altera) — San Jose, CA

Dec 2014 – Aug 2015
  • Manager of the 'Engineer to Engineer' how-to video program, supervising and training incoming interns in writing golden top reference designs and labs.
  • Lead Engineer for bench-marking Altera FPGA products to competitive hardware products (Xilinx, Microsemi, NVIDIA).
  • Programmer for bare-metal Nios and golden top reference design examples for FPGA development kits and SoC products.
  • Writer for demos, documentation, labs, and training on the Altera Design Store.

Founding Product Designer

DermLink, StartX — Palo Alto, CA

Feb 2012 – Feb 2013
  • Experience designer at a telehealth company funded through StartX, a start-up accelerator from Stanford University.
  • Developed demo content for venture capital to secure project funding.
  • Created mock-ups and wireframes for web and mobile application interfaces to restructure the site and app for better flow.
  • Used Bootstrap and Photoshop to generate detailed specifications of final designs and production-ready graphics in HTML and CSS.
  • Collected user stories to improve the user experience and app development.

Research Assistant: LabView and CAD Designer

Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) — Palo Alto, CA

Jun 2010 – Sep 2010
  • Designed, programmed, built, and tested a cosmic microwave background detector for Stanford's SLAC researchers.
  • Utilized Xilinx-based boards and LabView software to develop a robotics project used to investigate cosmic light from the Big Bang.

Research Assistant: Machine Instrumentation and Presenting Researcher

UC Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP) — Palo Alto, CA

Jan 2007 – Jan 2009
  • Utilized Altera and Microsemi-based boards for instrumentation and data acquisition on particle physics projects.
  • Summarized and presented data at lab meetings and conferences.
  • Tested irradiated silicon strip detectors to find differences between MCz and FZ detector performance in NASA's GLAST project and the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS project.
Credentials

Education & Certifications

13+
Years Experience
Stanford University
Stanford University
BS Engineering
Washington State University
Washington State University
Executive MBA
FCC Licensed
Amateur Radio Operator
Work Samples

Selected Work

Ebook

Kubernetes Monitoring Best Practices

A comprehensive guide covering Kubernetes monitoring best practices with a dedicated chapter on OpenTelemetry and Helm Chart deployments. It was produced for Sumo Logic's GTM content program and targets platform engineers and SRE teams.

KubernetesOpenTelemetryHelm
Read the Ebook
Thought Leadership

Best of 2023: Unified Kubernetes Monitoring With OpenTelemetry

Awarded in Cloud Native Now's "Best of Year" series. This article covers how Helm charts simplify Kubernetes deployment, how OpenTelemetry enables unified collection of logs, metrics, traces, and events, and how auto-instrumentation and semantic conventions reduce manual effort in Kubernetes monitoring.

KubernetesOpenTelemetryCloud Native
Read the Article
Webinar

AI-Driven Alerting: Reducing False Positives and MTTR

A speaker session demonstrating how to reduce false positives and mean time to resolution using AI-driven alerting and automated playbooks. It covers practical implementation patterns for SRE and operations teams.

AI/MLAlertingSRE
Watch the Webinar
View All Work
What I Do

Where Technical Depth Meets Market Impact

Go-to-Market Strategy

I lead end-to-end GTM planning that gets products to market faster and with sharper positioning. From ICP definition and launch sequencing to pipeline acceleration, the result is a go-to-market motion that sales can execute and buyers can understand.

Technical Content and Messaging

I turn complex infrastructure concepts into content that drives pipeline. Solution briefs, whitepapers, and case studies that move buyers from awareness to decision.

Sales Enablement

I build battle cards, competitive decks, and training that shorten sales cycles and improve win rates in contested cloud and infrastructure deals.

Competitive Intelligence

I turn market signals into positioning that wins. Deep analysis of the cloud-native, cybersecurity, and AI infrastructure landscape gives sales and product teams a clear edge.

Product-Led Growth

I apply customer insights and usage data to reduce time-to-value, increase product adoption, and build self-serve motions that compound revenue across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Contact

Let's talk about your next launch.

Whether you are planning a product launch, building out your GTM motion, or need technical content that converts, I would love to connect.

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