What Splunk Taught Me About Building Products

Apr 28, 2026

Before WickedFile, I spent four years at Splunk. I started as a sales engineer and ended up building and managing the Center of Excellence SE team from scratch.

Those years shaped everything about how I build products today.

Lesson 1: The best demo is a solved problem

As an SE, I gave hundreds of demos. The ones that closed deals weren't the ones with the fanciest slides. They were the ones where I said:

"Tell me about your biggest pain point right now."

Then I showed them exactly how Splunk solved it. In real time. With their own data.

This is the same principle behind WickedFile. We don't do generic demos. We pull a shop's actual data and show them exactly where they're losing money. It's not a feature tour. It's a mirror.

Lesson 2: Scale requires systems, not heroes

When I was asked to build the COE SE team, I had zero direct reports and no playbook. Within four months, we had 22 people across two continents.

The key was building systems that made good people great, instead of relying on a few rockstars:

  • Standardized onboarding that cut ramp time by 50%
  • Repeatable demo frameworks anyone could customize
  • Clear escalation paths so SEs knew when to bring in specialists

I believe the same thinking applies to startups as well. Every process gets documented. Every workflow gets systematized. The company that scales isn't the one with the best founder. It's the one where the founder becomes replaceable.

The steps are simple: Purpose → Parts → Connectors → Feedback → Iteration.

  • Purpose: What is the purpose for the process you are building?
  • Parts: What are the minimum steps to accomplish this goal or purpose?
  • Connectors: What are the handoffs between each step?
  • Feedback: How can we tell each step is working, or if something breaks?
  • Iteration: Ship the smallest MVP of this system to gut-check that it works.

Lesson 3: The gap between sales and product is where money dies

At Splunk, I sat between sales and product. I heard what customers actually needed (from sales calls) and what we were actually building (from product roadmap meetings).

The gap between those two things was enormous. And in that gap, deals died.

The Rapid Adoption Packages (RAP) I co-created were born from that gap. We packaged common use cases into pre-built solutions that sales could sell and customers could deploy in days instead of months.

The RAP program brought in 50+ new accounts in its first 6 months and was featured in the CEO's keynote at .conf.

How this shapes WickedFile

Every day at WickedFile, I use something I learned at Splunk:

  • Discovery-first selling instead of feature dumping
  • Systematized onboarding for both customers and team members
  • Bridging the gap between what customers need and what we build
  • Measuring impact in dollars, not dashboards

The best education I ever got wasn't my MBA (sorry, Emory). It was four years in the trenches at a company growing from $1B to $2B in revenue.

Want to chat about sales engineering, scaling teams, or the leap from enterprise to startup? Hit me up. If you're curious about what I'm building now, here's the why and the how.