TLI Graduate Spotlight: Marco Diaz
If you're a professional working in Security Technology, what's the best way to advance your career? What skills and abilities do you need to succeed at a senior level? We asked Marco Diaz, Director of Endpoint Protection at MetLife and a 2019 graduate of TLI's ST program, what he learned through the program and how it helped him succeed in his current position. Marco spoke to us from Cary, North Carolina, where MetLife has its headquarters.
Q: Marco, thank you for talking to us. We’d like to hear about your history with TLI and what you've been doing since then with MetLife. But can we back up a little bit and talk about where you originally went to college?
A: I did my undergrad at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. I did my major in MIS -- Management of Information Systems.
Q: Did you go immediately into industry, or did you start graduate work after that?
A: In my last semester I did an internship program where it was part of the curriculum and I worked for HP Fuller in Minnesota, and they kind of converted me right as I graduated. So I never really had a time off -- it switched straight into industry
Q: What did you do for HP Fuller?
A: I started off in ERP [Enterprise Resource Planning] security, but I kind of naturally moved into the information security space. I had a split role for a while and then I cut over and I was full time information security, but when I cut over that's when I found the master's program at TLI.
Q: How difficult a decision was it for you to transition over to that grad program?
A: It was an easy decision, actually. I was really excited about it. I wish I could go back and do it again, to be honest.
Q: What was the biggest surprise for you going through the program?
A: I thought it would be a little bit more technical. I went in at the high end of the technical skill set. I was very surprised at how diverse the cohort actually was, and how mature a lot of the students were -- not in terms of age necessarily, but they all had unique corporate experiences and some of them seemed like seasoned veterans. So you could learn a lot from your classmates and not just the material they're teaching in class. I probably learned more from my classmates than I did the curriculum.
Q: What element of the program got you connected to other people, where you had that much contact?
A: There seems to have been a lot of emphasis on getting people from different backgrounds together -- creating an intentionally diverse cohort. There are unlikely to be 10 people like me, with technical backgrounds. There were people there with law enforcement backgrounds, military training, one guy I ended up hiring later had a nuclear security background. Nothing to do with ST, and he's one of my top engineers.
Q: What skills or abilities do you feel that you picked up from that program that you did not have before you went in?
A: It helped me get acclimated to the corporate environment without actually setting foot into the corporate office. The public speaking sessions we had were definitely valuable, but one course in particular that allowed me to be extremely successful at internally selling ideas and technologies was Michael Rozin's course -- you had to quantify your subjective opinion in his class.
It really changed my way of thinking. It's not easy to explain, but there there's a way you have to sell yourself and sell ideas in a corporate setting that I was just unfamiliar with. Most people would be unfamiliar with it. Michael did a really good job of teaching us that without ever being in a corporate setting.
Q: A lot of people who have been through the program talk about the connections that they made, the networking opportunities and the really strong bonds that came from the study groups. What was your experience with that?
A: We still have an active group chat for our team. It's gotten a lot quieter over the years, but I could message 'em today and I'm sure everyone would be like, Hey, how are you doing?
Q: What has your career trajectory been for you since graduation?
A: Right after the program, I moved down to Florida. My mom had passed away near the end of the program, and I had to go down to Florida to manage her estate pretty much overnight. At that time I had all these life changes happening at once. I'm graduating the Master’s program and doing all of my mom's estate work.
So I started hitting the job market and I found the opportunity at MetLife through a contracting agency. I was able to apply a lot of the things I learned in TLI. Met ended up converting me full time a few months into the contracting position. One of the first things I did was sell a multimillion dollar EPP product internally that replaced the technology I was actually an expert in using a framework taught by Michael Rozin. I led the new EPP implementation and Met ended up promoting me a couple times to principal security architect. I helped expand the team from five people to 22 today in the process. In May of this year I moved into management, and I now manage the best team at MetLife of 22 rockstar engineers I helped build from the ground up.
Q: Was there anything specific to the ST program that you feel was really helpful in that environment?
A: The matrices that [TLI instructor] Michael Rozin made us do and the way he would nitpick them and point out all of our logical flaws really made me up my game to the next level. I took some of those same concepts and now when I sell an idea internally my goal is to quantify the subjective opinion of a diverse group of stakeholders to solidify a unified stance in a way that leaves little room for argument.
When I was presenting the EPP proof of concept results to leadership, we all agreed on our technology choice and I had the hard data to back up our stance. When you have that hard data behind you, it can build a lot of natural confidence and it actually becomes a lot easier to sell it because you have the numbers to back up what you're saying. It's not a guess, you're not pretending, it's all there.
Q: So it sounds like it also provided you with a fair amount of confidence when you were pitching an idea or presenting something.
A: Oh, absolutely. You have to be the most confident person in the room when you are presenting these things.
Q: If somebody with your background in security technology were thinking about a program like this, what would be the first step for them? Why would they want to do a program like this, rather than an MBA?
A: As I said at the beginning, TLI put a lot of emphasis into not building a cohort full of the same like-minded people. You can have those complex debates amongst your teammates. You are going to get a different perspective and different viewpoints every time, I don't know how MBA programs are diversified in comparison, but that would be my key selling point. And I would definitely advise anyone thinking about the program to embrace the unknown and dive in head first.