Data management from the outside in

Two weeks into his new product management job at Everpure, Stan Yanitskiy was in the back of an executive briefing center, there to shadow and learn. A customer asked Everpure co-founder John “Coz” Colgrove a question, and Colgrove looked to the back of the room and said: “We have Stan working on that.”

But Stan didn't actually build his career through enterprise storage. He came from the SSD industry, and his first days on the job at Everpure were spent researching the basics. “My SSD background carried over very marginally,” he laughs. “My first few days at Everpure were just web searching what SAN was, what FC was.”

Ten years later, Stan’s a Senior Product Manager on Evergreen//One, building the services that promise businesses they can store, reach, and recover their data when it matters most.

Stan can shrug off the storage learning curve because of the company around him. Everpure has some of the foremost storage experts in the industry, a depth that allows the company to hire for range: people from other fields who show up with a different set of questions, skills, and perspectives.

Start from the outcome

Evergreen//One delivers the Everpure Platform as a service with performance, availability, capacity, and energy efficiency written into the contract. Everpure owns the hardware, installs it in the customer's data center, and refreshes it over time without taking them offline. A one-time purchase ends at the loading dock. A service keeps going. The customer is buying a result, and Everpure carries the obligation to define that result and hit it every quarter.

That changes what the PM job is. “The product we're delivering is a solution to a problem,” Stan says. “The fact that it's storage is almost irrelevant.” Domain knowledge helps, but the role is won on the ability to lead a problem, pull in the experts, and turn a complex system into a service the customer never has to think or worry about.

It also puts Stan’s team, part of Everpure’s Digital Experience Business Group, in an unusual seat. “We almost operate as a customer of Everpure,” he says. “We're using Everpure's hardware products to deliver a service.” Stan’s team consumes the company's arrays the way a customer would, feeling the gaps a customer would feel, and carrying that back to the hardware teams as requirements. 

A big part of the job is steering roadmaps they don't own.

“Once you're accountable for the outcome, the scope keeps widening,” Stan says. One of Stan's add-ons is Cyber Recovery and Resilience. When a customer goes down to ransomware or disaster, Everpure is contractually on the hook to stand up recovery infrastructure on SLA-backed timelines.

“That's not possible with a traditional purchase,” Stan says. A box you bought can't promise you a recovery target. A service can, because Everpure carries the risk. Owning the outcome means anything that protects it becomes fair game to build next.

Leadership pushes you further

Stan took the zero-data-loss guarantee he was developing to the CFO, expecting to get the number talked down. The CFO told him to guarantee more.

“Because we want to stand behind our products,” Stan says. “Losing data is the worst possible thing for a storage array, and the attitude was, we should own that fully. Most of my opportunities with leadership have been them pushing me to go even further. I expected no, and got, ‘Why not more?’ That shapes how confident you become in your own thinking."

Where AI moves the work

Pre AI, when FlashArray shipped, running a single array stopped being a job for a handful of people and became about a quarter of one person's time. The other people didn't leave. They moved up to work that was more impactful.

Now, AI does the same thing with product management, and the part it’s taking over is the early grind. A PM spends most of the day turning a rough idea into something solid enough to put in front of other people. You write a first version, see where it's thin, rewrite it, check your assumptions, rewrite it again. That loop is most of the cost of getting an idea ready, and it's the part AI handles well.

“Instead of going to people with a v0, you're going to them with a v0.9,” Stan says. “The inputs from engineering, from sales, from customers, they're still essential. You're just coming to them at a much later point.”

What that buys you is time, and that time lands on the work AI can't touch: sitting with a customer and working out what they actually need, or looking at five things you could build and deciding which one is worth it. That's the harder work, the work storage admins moved to once the busywork was gone.

Why the work pays off

Everpure brings the pace of newer technology to a category not known for it. For a PM from fast-moving software, that's a lot of surface area to work on. In ten years, Stan has watched colleagues build entire careers here without ever going deep on storage internals. They didn't have to. The expertise is all around you. Everyone's deep in something, and the product gets better when those perspectives come together.

Ten years ago, Stan spent his first days researching the basics. Now, he's the one making the promises customers build their businesses on.