A Passion for Products, People, and Problem Solving

Grant Shirk is Head of Product Marketing in our San Francisco office. His team is responsible for messaging, positioning, and go-to-market strategy across our cloud-first networking platform. Here’s Grant’s story of how he “fell into product marketing and then fell in love with it.”

Why did you join Meraki?

I’ve found the most satisfying and exciting work happens when three things intersect: unique technologies, deep design thinking, and a diverse team focused on solving meaningful customer problems.

I saw these things at Meraki, where every conversation starts and ends with the problems we can solve for our customers. Not everyone frames the problem in the same way, but that’s what makes us powerful. Our team’s diverse perspectives let us examine customer challenges from dozens of angles and find solutions that encompass hundreds of facets.

Looking ahead, I’m excited to see how our solution- and customer-oriented orientation can help companies accelerate new hybrid ways of work, innovation, and operation.

What was your path to product marketing and marketing leadership?

Well, first I fell into it, then I fell in love with it. Back when the Nokia 6100 was the coolest device on the planet (and the best phone to play Snake on), I worked as a user experience designer developing apps and operating system software for cell phones. We were way ahead of our time, but I felt like I wasn’t solving a big enough problem.

It was in my next role, designing voice applications for some of the world’s highest-volume 800 numbers, that I caught the enterprise software bug hard. Working closely with these large, well-known companies sparked my curiosity about how they made decisions and how those decisions impacted the experiences they delivered for their customers.

Through an acquisition, I fell into vertical and enterprise product marketing and never looked back. The mix of technology, tough business problems, finding tangible ROI, and working with sales is what makes product marketing so rewarding.

What do you look for when hiring product marketers?

Product marketing is a fascinating discipline. You can’t really go to school to learn it, and I’ve never met two PMMs with the same background. Some of the best PMMs I’ve worked with come from unexpected paths: law, linguistics, government, fashion, even aerospace.

These marketers had a few things in common, though: a structured approach to thinking and writing, curiosity about how things work and how people think, and ownership over their work. No matter your background, if you can break down a problem, frame it so others can understand it, and take responsibility for continuously improving the outcome, you’re a great fit for this team.

Side note: we’re hiring.

How does your work align with our company values?

The two company values that best describe how our team works are Care Deeply and Simplify Everything.

Empathy is the first step, and the skill we exercise most frequently. When we’re doing our best work, we’re attuned to what drives our customers, how they want to learn about new solutions, and where we can help. We care deeply about learning new technology and market shifts, which helps us collaborate more effectively with product, engineering, and sales.

We use this outside-in lens to distill knowledge into simple, powerful stories that connect our platform to our customers’ priorities. It takes a little bravery (and a lot of humility) to bring a new point of view to the market, but it’s these perspectives that help our customers tackle their next million-dollar problem.