Blue Team Con 2026

Name: Security vs Product: A Professional Identity Crisis
Start: 2026-09-12T10:30:00-0500
End: 2026-09-12T11:30:00-0500

Security vs Product: A Professional Identity Crisis

Saturday September 12, 2026 10:30am - 11:30am CDT

Swissôtel Chicago

For years, my instinct was to fix things. See an alert, chase the threat. Find a gap, build a detection. Witness an incident, contain and remediate. After a career built on DFIR, detection engineering, incident response, and sysadmin work, I was trained to be a solution machine, and I was good at it.

Then I became a Product Manager.
Everything broke.

Suddenly the job wasn't to solve the problem in front of me, it was to figure out whether I even had the right problem. The skills that made me dangerous in a SOC were quietly working against me in a product role. I was writing requirements that looked suspiciously like runbooks. I was treating user research like a post-incident review, assuming I knew the problems because I've been there before. Jumping straight to the five whys without sitting in the discomfort of not knowing yet.

This talk is the honest story of my first year as a Product Manager and what a decade in security taught me. Both the gifts and the baggage.
The gifts were real: I understood the users deeply because I was the user. I could cut through technical ambiguity, earn credibility with engineering teams fast, and spot when a "product problem" was actually an architecture problem in disguise. Threat modeling translated almost directly into risk prioritization frameworks. Log analysis taught me how to find signal in noisy customer feedback.

But the baggage was heavy too. Security work rewards decisive, fast, technical action. Product work rewards patience, ambiguity tolerance, and ruthless problem definition. The pivot from solution-first thinking to problem-first thinking didn't happen naturally, it had to be unlearned, deliberately and sometimes painfully.

In this session, I'll walk through the mental model shift that changed how I approach product decisions, the specific security habits that carried over (and why), the ones I had to consciously kill, and how I'm still learning to bridge both worlds. Whether you're a security professional curious about PM roles, a PM trying to work with security-minded engineers, or someone navigating a major career pivot, this talk is for you.

Speakers

Amanda Berlin, Infosystir

Sr. Product Manager, Cybersecurity, Blumira

Amanda Berlin is the Sr. Product Manager of Cybersecurity at Blumira, where she leads product initiatives focused on XDR and response capabilities as well as incident detection engineering initiatives.
An accomplished author, speaker, and podcaster, Amanda is known for her ability to communicate complex technical concepts in a way that is accessible and engaging for audiences of all backgrounds. She co-authored an O’Reilly Media book Defensive Security Handbook: Best Practices... Read More →

Saturday September 12, 2026 10:30am - 11:30am CDT
Swissôtel Chicago 323 E Wacker Dr, Chicago, IL 60601, USA

Talk

Audience Intermediate
Subject Career Matters
global Y

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Blue Team Con 2026

Amanda Berlin, Infosystir

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Amanda Berlin, Infosystir

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