Welcoming Denise Persson to our Board of Directors

Today it’s my pleasure to announce that Denise PerssonDenise Persson has joined Lightstep’s Board of Directors.

We couldn’t be happier about the news! From a pure resume standpoint, Denise is a world-class technology marketer: She is presently the Chief Marketing Officer at Snowflake, and she brings 20 years of experience scaling high-growth companies. Prior to joining SnowflakeSnowflake, she served as the CMO for Apigee, helping to take them public in 2015. When I asked around about marketing executives who really understand how to reach and educate a highly technical audience, Denise’s name came up time and time again.

While Denise is clearly an impressive operator, she is also a great coach and provides thoughtful, pragmatic advice and guidance, always informed by experience and examples. In our conversations about Lightstep’s challenges and opportunities, she listens carefully, asks thoughtful questions, uncovers hidden assumptions, and helps me reframe my own thinking; this is the sort of thought-partnership that Lightstep wants from an independent board member, and so we feel especially fortunate to be working with Denise in this capacity.

At Snowflake, she helped define – then lead – a new category. The industry-wide move to cloud computing was hugely disruptive for Snowflake’s market, and Denise and her team navigated that transition brilliantly. Today, Lightstep’s market is in the midst of an analogous transformation brought on by microservices and serverless computing: as enterprises decompose their monoliths, their traditional APM solutions have ceased to function, leaving confusion and ambiguity in their wake. Lightstep is eager to educate our ecosystem about these challenges and light a path toward operational confidence at scale, and Denise will be instrumental as we engage in this effort.

We asked Denise why she accepted the board role here at Lightstep. In her own words: “I’m very happy to join Lightstep’s board at an exciting phase of their growth, and a very transformative time for software development. Lightstep is well positioned to become a key player in helping enterprises of all sizes to adopt microservices more quickly, which has become essential for any organization that needs to launch new products and services faster and more efficiently. Lightstep has an incredible team of passionate and highly experienced individuals, I look forward to collaborating with them and sharing my experiences creating new categories.”

We look forward to it, too. Welcome, Denise!