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I’m Kyle Kohler. I’m a product manager over the integration strategy at Recorded Future.

Recorded Future is the world’s largest threat intelligence provider. We are covering all sorts of domains of intelligence. It’s geopolitical intelligence, cyber intelligence, payment fraud intelligence. And essentially intelligence is this data that an organization uses to take action and make a better decision. So the more that you understand a subject or topic, a current event, the better that you can define what actions you take to either defend your organization or proactively increase your competitive edge.

As a product manager, it’s funny. I see it as this arson firefighter educator role. And I think that definitely needs to be unpacked a bit. As an arson, you’re starting fires. So, very strategically, which fire do I put under which team, under which initiative, which fire do I stoke and one do I burn hotter? And as a firefighter, you’ve got maybe fires coming in being reported to you from a customer, from an organization, from another product team who needs this other product team to make something happen. And so, you’re very strategically figuring out what to stamp out, what to stoke. And as an educator, you’re also teaching others how to start fires and put out fires. So, you’re constantly going from one thing to the next and keeping all of these moving pieces going. There’s no one project that you just shepherd along and that’s the only thing you work on. You’re constantly context switching and a good product manager has that multi-domain knowledge to think laterally, but also track how this thing affects that thing and how it might affect the other thing in the future.

At Recorded Future, we’re a global organization and I’m based on the west coast of California. So I wake up in the morning and the first thing I’ve got are 10 to 12 Slack messages from across the globe that come in from different geographies. Other people are ending their day and they’ve got some questions that maybe I can answer or they’re looking for how to direct on who might have the right answer. So the first thing generally starts with voraciously checking Slack and I’m answering notifications as I mentioned questions and the next thing is okay well from the answers to those questions are there new initiatives that need to get spun up or are there existing initiatives that need to get nudged along or are there certain fires that need to get stamped out and that’s the whole day is you’re really tracking where things are in their current state what needs to get responded to and what needs to get pushed along.

Recorded Future really was attractive to me because it was a pretty new field within cyber security and within technology but also as a company was not just related to IT and cyber had this geopolitical and payment fraud type of angle looking at the world. So it was really taking a big data problem how do you track everything that happens everywhere but then how do you break that down into these bite-sized pieces that ultimately help an organization’s current mission. So I really was attracted by the fact that we are helping organizations secure the world. We’re able to do that by securing the world with intelligence, but it’s so multi-domain that you’re just never going to get bored. There’s always something new. There’s always something to track. There’s always some new threat. There’s always some new initiative, some new innovation. And Recorded Future has really been at that cutting edge of innovation. Always coming up with what’s next in the market, what’s next in the threat landscape and how will we as a company address supercharging the existing missions of our organizations that we help today.

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