About

I'm Marissa Bellas. I've worked on security and AI from three seats, and this site exists because the view from each one contradicts the others in ways that turned out to matter.

Delivery first. I was on the deployment side, which is where you learn that the gap between a control on a slide and a control an operator will actually run is where most security programs quietly fail.

Then sales. Sales teaches you a thing delivery cannot: the difference between what a customer asks for, what they will approve budget for, and what they will still be running in eighteen months. Those are three different products.

Now customer experience. Product-development adjacent — close enough to the people building it to be heard, far enough downstream to see what customers actually run into once the deal is signed and the pilot is over. It's a useful vantage and an uncomfortable one. You find out how much of what you carried as a seller was real, how much was a symptom of something else, and how much of what gets built answers a question nobody in the field was asking.

What this site is

A field guide rather than a blog. The difference is structure: a feed buries everything older than a month, and a guide is meant to be returned to. It's organized by what you came for — a situation, a practice, a failure, or something arriving next — not by when I happened to write it.

On customer stories

Everything drawn from real work is composited. Details from separate engagements get recombined, numbers are rounded or synthesized, and identifying specifics are removed or changed. Where a story needs a concrete setting, I use a fictional one and say so — the State of Zava is the recurring example.

This isn't hedging. Vague anonymization — "a large customer in a regulated industry" — is worse writing and worse reading. A named composite lets the specifics stay sharp while the client stays unidentifiable. Anything with the composite marker at the top follows that convention.

Disclosure

I work in customer experience in this industry, and I write about the space my employer sells into. Everything here is my own view, written on my own time, and does not represent my employer. I don't write about my own products, I don't publish anything I learned under NDA or in a customer escalation, and where a piece touches a category my employer competes in, I say so in the piece.

Elsewhere

Speaking, podcast, and review requests: hello@marissabellas.com