What does it take to build products that stand out in one of the most technical spaces in the industry? In this podcast hosted by Cassio Sampaio, Nutanix Vice President & General Manager Dan Ciruli speaks on building differentiated infrastructure products. He explores the realities of legacy systems, the skills PMs need to thrive in deeply technical environments, and the opportunities emerging across the evolving infrastructure stack.
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Show Notes
- Infrastructure technology stays in production far longer than most expect.
- New trends attract attention, but most real-world workloads still run on older systems.
- Product managers must distinguish between the user and the buyer in enterprise products.
- Deep customer conversations reveal needs that aren’t obvious from technical specs alone.
- Buyers often prioritize business outcomes like cost, productivity, and uptime.
- The user’s daily workflow and pain points require separate consideration from the buyer’s goals.
- Enterprise sales cycles demand flexibility, since every prospect may focus on a different layer of the stack.
- Product leaders must understand whether a customer wants technical depth or future vision in a meeting.
- Change management often influences purchasing decisions as much as technology does.
- Technical credibility with engineering teams is essential for infrastructure PMs.
- Hands-on familiarity with tools like Docker or Kubernetes strengthens trust within engineering teams.
- Highly technical B2C PMs often struggle to transition successfully into infrastructure roles.
- Competing with hyperscalers requires focusing on areas they cannot or will not address, such as multi-cloud.
- Aligning with a customer’s existing cloud strategy matters more than challenging it.
- Long-lived legacy systems create ongoing opportunities for innovation at every layer of the stack.
- Technology trends evolve, but older systems remain essential, often for decades.
- Abstraction layers continue to rise, improving developer experience while preserving complexity underneath.
- Every layer of the modern infrastructure stack—hardware, virtualization, orchestration—contains opportunities for PM innovation.
- Open-source ecosystems accelerate innovation but require clear thinking about value exchange.
- Successful infrastructure PMs consistently spend time with customers, strengthening products through direct insights.
About the speaker
Dan Ciruli leads the Cloud Native Product Management team at Nutanix (after joining with the acquisition of D2iQ in 2023). Prior to that, he was general manager for the Zuora Platform business and led the Zuora Platform product management team. During his seven years prior at Google Cloud, he was a founding member of the OpenAPI Initiative and sat on the Istio Steering Committee. Prior to Google, he led product management on the Documentum xCP platform at EMC and was a founder at Digipede Technologies, a pioneering grid computing company.
About the host
I am a product person with 20+ years of experience most recently with DigitalOcean, Apple, Auth0 and now running Customer Identity at Okta. I love technical products and my sweet spot is B2B SaaS / IaaS. I have done a bit of everything including running engineering teams, corporate development and marketing and lived and worked in Canada, US and Brazil.