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Actionable
Takeaways

If you can't answer "why are we doing this?" — don't do it:

Rachel's 80/20 filter is ruthless: "If somebody asks me, Rachel, why are we doing this? And my answer sucks, then we just don't do it." With a lean team, ruthless prioritization isn't optional — it's the strategy.

Category creation is an outcome, not a brief:

"If you focus on the love, not the label, that's a better strategy." Wiz didn't set out to own CNAPP. They identified a real gap, built for it, and let the market catch up. Companies that lead with an acronym are building for the analyst spreadsheet, not the customer.

Ditch the press release. Own your own channel:

Blog posts over wire distributions. No AP style restrictions, no wire fees, real SEO, trackable data, and a story instead of an announcement. When comms drives people to assets you own, it becomes a growth function — not a cost center.

Don't hire an agency before you hire a comms lead:

"You can only be so successful if your client is enabling you." Agencies need a dedicated partner embedded in the business. Founders or CMOs don't have bandwidth to be that partner — and without it, even a great agency can't perform.

Research teams are an underused comms asset:

The Wiz research team operates as a media partner — patient, technically fluent, and trusted by reporters directly. When researchers can pitch stories with credibility and comms can translate them for a general audience, you get coverage that neither could produce alone.

Conversation
Highlights

Wiz broke records on the way up — fastest to $100M ARR, one of the most talked-about companies in cybersecurity — and it did it with a communications team you could count on one hand. Rachel Ratchford, Senior Director of Communications at Wiz, runs that team. In this episode of The Narrative, she gets into what actually drives Wiz’s narrative (hint: it’s not press releases), why category creation is an outcome not a strategy, and how she rebuilt her own relationship with the comms function after a crisis of faith about whether PR was just noise.

This is a conversation about doing more with less, cutting everything that doesn’t move the needle, and building comms as a growth engine — not a support function.

Topics Discussed

  • Category creation vs. customer obsession: Why Wiz never set out to “create a category” — and how focusing on customer pain, not analyst acronyms, led Gartner to name the CNAPP category around what Wiz had already built.
  • The 80/20 rule of comms: How Rachel’s test for any program or initiative is simple — if she can’t articulate a strong reason to do it, they don’t. Killing Tier 2 award submissions and boring press releases to double down on what actually moves the needle.
  • Why Wiz largely ditched the press release: The shift to blog-first announcements — owning the URL, the SEO, the data, and the story — and how comms at Wiz became a lead gen engine that drives demo requests.
  • What’s actually resonating with media right now: Fewer reporters, higher bars. Product news is nearly impossible to land. What breaks through: timely, counterintuitive research stories that tap into existing cultural moments — like the Wiz researcher who found an exposed database inside Malt Book right when Silicon Valley was obsessed with it.
  • How to build (and use) an agency relationship that actually works: The qualities of the Wiz agency partnership — direct line to the CEO, willing to kill bad pitches, no bottlenecks — and why agencies fail when there’s no dedicated comms person running point on the client side.
  • The media landscape shift: Shrinking newsrooms, the rise of independent newsletters and Substacks, and why analysts are becoming the new tech influencers for practitioner-level product coverage.
  • Team structure philosophy: Why Rachel believes in generalists over highly segmented comms teams, and why reporters don’t care whether a story is “partner-led” or “research-led.”