Coro is a modular cybersecurity platform for small and mid-sized businesses. It is run out of Chicago, with offices in New York, Tel Aviv, Milan, Madrid and London. I joined as its first product marketer and left as Director of Product Marketing.
The challenge: no shared knowledge, and nearly 200 people
There was no company-wide place where anything was written down. We were already close to 200 people across six offices, and the knowledge that mattered lived in personal drives, in Slack threads, and in the heads of whoever had been there longest. Sales could not find the content they needed for a customer conversation. Tool sprawl was severe, and HR was separately evaluating Notion and a couple of other options, which would have made it worse.
My own remit made this urgent. I had been hired to build a team covering two functions the company had never had, product marketing and technical writing. Both exist to produce knowledge for other people to use. Neither works if there is nowhere to put it.
Getting the mandate
I persuaded senior leadership to let me lead the selection, on the argument that a platform meant to be shared needs stakeholders from every team in the room from the first meeting. That is how I ran it. The process is written up here as seven steps for choosing the right software for your team, drawn directly from this project. I was arguing the ROI case for internal platforms publicly at the same time, because the hardest part of this is usually getting a company to fund it before it is big enough to feel the pain.
We chose Axero, a decision I made jointly with the VP of Operations. I ran the negotiation, and I took the budget request to the CFO myself, in a one to one conversation.
Adoption, which is the part that usually fails
Moving a company into an intranet is much harder than buying one. Every team elected a knowledge owner, nominated by their own manager and accountable for what their team knew. I led that group. The sales owner and I worked closest of all, because sales enablement had the shortest path to revenue and the least patience for a system that does not answer.
We wired the platform into SharePoint, Google Drive and Slack, then built a question and answer bot in Slack on top of it. This was before a general purpose model could do that kind of retrieval. When I showed it to the VP of Sales in August 2024, he said it was the best news he had had all year.
The adoption I am proudest of was never mandated. The whole engineering and product organization moved onto the platform rather than staying in Confluence. Nobody required them to.
The results
Axero's published case study on the rollout reports a 40% improvement in sales performance, a 60% reduction in onboarding costs and a 70% rise in satisfaction and engagement.
After I left, a new channel hire wrote up her first week publicly: systems ready on day one, product information and value proposition she could find, and a clear picture of who the company sold to. She reached all of it by her third day without knowing who to ask.
