I’ve taken companies from early positioning to category leadership. I understand what engineers are building, what buyers are feeling, and exactly where the two get lost in translation.
It’s all too common: You shipped new messaging. Engineering pushed back. Sales ignored the new deck. And your best customers described the product in a way that had nothing to do with any of it.
By the time you see it, the damage is already structural.
If you’re standing up marketing for the first time, the wrong leader sets the foundation crooked — every hire and every launch after sits on it. If you already have a function, it’s worse:
Your best marketers have left. And the replacements? Hired by a leader who didn’t know what good looked like. Engineering and sales have stopped believing in the function and started routing around it. The roadmap is being built to a positioning strategy that doesn’t reflect what customers actually need. And you’re 18 months in, with a team to unwind and a function to rebuild.
A bad hire can turn into a massive setback.
Let me help your organization avoid that.
Most marketing leaders reach for better copy when the problem is upstream of the copy.
The fix is a leader who can sit with engineering, pressure-test the roadmap, and still deliver positioning that doesn’t need a sales rep to explain it.
At Camunda, my team and I worked directly with Gartner and Forrester to help define new analyst categories — Gartner’s BOAT market, and Forrester’s shift from DPA to Automation Fabric / APO. Your product doesn’t have to fit an existing category. It can define one.
When AI tooling was still a hard internal sell, I pushed procurement through and got my team on it — the first function outside engineering to adopt it. Then I brought in a specialist to turn one-off prompting into repeatable systems: Voice of CEO, Voice of CTO, battle-card generation. Getting an executive’s voice right for comms used to take days of back-and-forth; built into the system, the first draft lands in minutes.
“Dan had our team using AI before most of the company had a strategy for it. What stuck with me was building our executives’ voices into the workflow up front. Getting the CEO’s voice right on a piece used to take days of back-and-forth — with Dan’s approach the first draft came back in minutes, already close.”
I stood up Camunda’s product marketing from scratch, building specialized teams: technical marketing driving PLG, solution marketing owning SLG and the industry verticals, and content marketing tying it all together under one coherent brand. I owned hiring and ran the function end to end, roughly a $2.5M operation fully loaded. And I grew the people, not just the headcount, promoting multiple team members from IC into management as we scaled.
The work I’m most proud of happened at the intersection of product, engineering, sales, and customers — not in a silo. Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Embedded with product and engineering to pressure-test roadmap decisions and translate technical context into market positioning.
“I had the pleasure of working with Dan, and I always valued our collaboration. In particular, I really enjoyed partnering with him on shaping and refining our market narratives. Dan has a strong ability to quickly understand technical details and translate them into clear, compelling messaging. Our work together was highly iterative and productive. He was always open to feedback, and each pass genuinely improved the outcome.”
Built enablement that field teams actually used. Competitive battle cards, objection guides, and positioning frameworks shaped by deal reviews and real customer conversations — not assumptions from a conference room.
“Most of the decks marketing hands you don’t survive contact with a real customer. What came out of Dan’s team did. Their battle cards and positioning gave me language that matched what buyers were actually worried about, so I wasn’t improvising in front of a prospect. In competitive deals it was the first thing I reached for — and you could tell Dan had built a team that worked from real deals, not guesswork.”
Worked directly with enterprise customers to understand their challenges and shape how they told their story alongside ours.
“Daniel and I collaborated frequently on strategic aspects for lead generation and expansion of our customer base. He has always been a great partner — bouncing ideas back and forth that often led to great initiatives that helped us grow. Collaboration between Product Marketing and Customer Success is crucial for the success of the business, and Daniel took that seriously and made the most of it.”
“Dan is an exceptional product marketing leader who combines deep technical expertise, sharp go-to-market strategy, and team mentorship with a strong get-it-done attitude. Whether leading complex product launches, creating impactful content, or shaping competitive positioning, Dan consistently delivers outstanding results. His collaborative, thoughtful approach quickly built a true partnership.”
“I was incredibly impressed with Dan’s deep understanding of the business, market and technology. This, combined with his strong emotional intelligence, earned him the respect needed to effectively collaborate cross functionally with product, sales and the entire executive team in an international environment.”
“The two thoughts that immediately come to mind are ‘natural leader’ and ‘enthusiastic visionary.’ Dan consistently adapted his communication style with intention and skill — thoughtful and supportive with peers, authoritative and clear with executives. His team holds him in the highest regard, and those of us fortunate enough to call him a peer often saw him as our unofficial leader. He elevates every team he joins.”
“I joined Dan’s team already an experienced leader, and I still grew under him — which tells you something. He handed me real ownership from day one and backed it with feedback that was direct but always constructive: the kind that makes you better, not smaller. He pushed my thinking, not just my output. The best leaders make strong people stronger, and that’s exactly what Dan did for me.”
Started as a co-founder and product manager. Moved into product marketing at companies that were going somewhere fast.
As VP of Product Marketing at Camunda, I built and scaled the function from one person to twelve while the company grew ARR from $25M to over $150M, reaching coveted "Centaur" SaaS status. I shaped company-level GTM strategy alongside the C-suite, including the AI-first keynote that launched Camunda's Agentic Orchestration go-to-market, and engaged the board on direction well beyond marketing's remit. Along the way I helped establish new analyst categories (Gartner's BOAT and Forrester's APO), earned Visionary placement in the Gartner BOAT Magic Quadrant, led launches across both SaaS and self-managed editions, and developed individual contributors into the function's next generation of people leaders.
At Applitools, I led go-to-market for a late-stage startup pioneering Visual AI in test automation, work that helped position the company for its $250M acquisition by Thoma Bravo in 2021. I elevated the analyst relations program through regular engagement with Gartner, Forrester, and IDC, contributing to inclusion in the first-ever Gartner Market Guide for AI-augmented Software Testing. I also launched new products, repositioned the core offering into a unified platform, and drove sustained organic growth through content and SEO despite the disruptions of COVID-19.
Over nearly a decade at Telerik (acquired by Progress mid-tenure), I grew from sales engineering and global sales leadership into senior product marketing roles spanning developer tools, testing, and ALM. As Product Owner for the Test Studio automation platform and the Fiddler debugging tool, I helped drive Telerik's first Gartner Magic Quadrant appearance, earning back-to-back Visionary placements. I owned pricing and packaging strategy and created an auto-renewal program that generated over $3M in incremental revenue, while mentoring the team and representing the company at major industry conferences worldwide.
Earlier: Co-founder at EyeOnEntry (visitor management platform; clients included General Dynamics and Lehman Brothers) · Product Manager at MembersFirst.
Depends on your stage. At Series A, I’ll lead all of marketing: build the function, own positioning, carry the number. At Series B and beyond, I’m happiest running product marketing as a strategic function — not a content factory. Underneath, it’s the same job: connect what you’ve built to the people who’ll buy it. Tell me where you are and we’ll figure out which one you need.
Yes, because I’ve done it. Technical depth means I never get lost in a product briefing and never need engineering to review my positioning. It doesn’t mean I lead with specs. The job is still to make buyers feel the problem and want the solution.
At Camunda I built the product marketing function from one to 12 people, covering technical marketing, solution marketing, and content marketing. I’ve also been a team of one. I’m comfortable at both ends, and I know how to hire for outcome rather than headcount. When the team is lean, I’m hands-on. When the team is scaled, I’m a multiplier.
I’m your hoodie leader. My best work happens in a room with the product team. If you want someone to impress a VC with a blazer, well, maybe I could throw one on as an exception. If you want someone who’ll sit with your product team on Monday and have sharp positioning by Friday, I am. You’ll know pretty quickly if it’s right.
Camunda is a company I’m genuinely proud of — the growth, the analyst recognition, the team we built. The company’s direction shifted and so did mine. No bad blood. Just time for the next thing.
Because I apply the same methodology to marketing myself as I do to marketing products. Know your audience, lead with their problem, prove it with outcomes, make it easy to take the next step. If you noticed it looked like a product site, that’s exactly what I was going for.
I shoot a lot of photography. Mostly landscape, cityscape, and travel. I often chase the kind of light that only lasts about thirty seconds. It’s where the product instincts go quiet and the eye takes over. If you’re curious, take a look.
Yes. I built this using Claude Code CLI in VS Code in a few hours. Which is kind of the point — I understand how these tools actually work, not just what they claim to do on a landing page.
Let’s chat and see if I might be a good fit as your next marketing leader.