Devin MacDonald had never worked somewhere that let a frontline sales manager help shape how a whole company works with AI. Abnormal gave her room to build her own path. When she noticed her team's best ideas were scattered across a shared drive, invisible to the rest of the company, she didn't wait for someone else to fix it. She built the fix herself, and that instinct has defined almost everything she's done since.
A New Kind of Company
Before Abnormal, Devin spent seven years at Zoom, working in unified communications and learning how to run a tight process. When she started looking for what came next, she wanted a company built around a problem that actually mattered.
"I was drawn to Abnormal because of the innovative structure of the company, the fact that it's in cybersecurity and is doing so much with behavioral AI," she said.
The stage of the company mattered just as much as the mission. Abnormal was scaling at a pace she found genuinely interesting, and finding a company growing that fast while still building around a problem worth solving was rare.
That combination, an ambitious mission paired with a company still figuring out its own shape, turned out to be exactly the kind of environment where Devin does her best work.
Skills Nobody Could Find
As part of the Mid-Market organization, Devin noticed a problem hiding in plain sight. AEs across the team, herself included, had built useful skills in Claude: shortcuts that added efficiency to the sales process, deepened client research, and sharpened how the team prepared to walk into a customer conversation. But those skills lived wherever the person who built them happened to save them, known only to a handful of people at a time.
So she pulled them together. She took what she and her peers had built and elevated it so the entire organization could see it and use it, not just the small pocket of AEs who happened to already know it existed.
"We have AEs literally all over the world, and a lot of them have really phenomenal ideas but don't get the chance to interact with each other."
That distance was the actual problem. Talented AEs were solving the same challenges independently, over and over, with no way to learn from each other. Consolidating those skills into one visible place changed that. Nobody had to spend months rebuilding something a peer had already spent months refining. They could take an idea that already worked, build on it, and move faster because someone else had done the first version of the work.
Ownership Nobody Assigned Her
Devin traces her growth over the past year and a half back to two specific things: ownership and intellectual honesty. Not as abstract values on a wall, but as the actual reason she's been able to take on work well outside a typical sales manager's scope.
"Nowhere else that I've ever worked has really allowed someone who's a frontline sales leader to really step in and meaningfully contribute to the AI transformation, internal operations, and the way that this business thinks about selling going forward," she said.
Getting there didn't take a formal process, a promotion, or a title change. It took raising her hand and saying what she wanted to work on.
"No one is siloed, and the expectation is just that you're going to bring it all, and what that all is is really defined by you."
She told leadership she was passionate about AI transformation and wanted to support the sales team's pipeline generation, account management, and customer support. Nobody told her to stay in her lane or pointed her back toward her own team's numbers. They said yes, handed her the resources to act on it, and let her run.
Devin isn't an engineer, and she hadn't been a heavy AI user before joining Abnormal. She's since built a set of forecasting skills that support the management side of the business, cut down her own inspection time, and sharpened the coaching she gives her team.
"The fact that this is an organization that doesn't place people like me in a box, but instead welcomes perspectives from people who are energized and want to contribute, is incredibly important."
Working across departments let her flex skills she hadn't used in her core sales role and expand what she calls her own acumen, all while feeling like her voice carried weight outside her direct team, something she says she'd never experienced anywhere else.
Building What Comes Next
Devin's connection to AI Transformation didn't start with the workbench. A year ago, she was part of the earliest beta tests of Abnormal's Nora AI bots and custom bot creation, work that fed into several internal proofs of concept and eventually led to the workbench and the broader set of factories now being built for GTM.
She's now working with the AI Transformation team on the next stage of that: a single resource built to cover everything an account executive needs across the full customer lifecycle, from the coldest first outreach to an account the company has held for years. The goal is clarity. AEs should know exactly what to do each day, why they're doing it, and how to do it well, without guessing or reinventing a process someone else already solved.
That progression, from early bot testing to a company-wide workbench, changed how Devin sees her own role. She describes it as seeing a larger operational picture than she'd had access to before, understanding where she fits inside it, and pushing herself and her team toward work neither had attempted previously.
It's a bigger version of the same instinct that got her here in the first place. She saw AEs without a way to learn from each other, and she built the fix. Now she's helping build the next one, at a larger scale, for every AE who joins after her.
The distinction matters to her. Abnormal's product uses AI to protect its customers. The internal transformation Devin is part of is a separate effort, aimed at changing how the company itself operates.
"It isn't slop. It isn't for nothing. It's to change the way that people work."
Where That Feeling Comes From
Most of Devin's AEs joined within the last six months. They're already telling her this is the best job they've ever had, and the reason traces back to something she's experienced firsthand, not just something she tries to create for them.
One moment from the past few months makes the point clearly. Her segment recently held an offsite where every manager took a turn presenting on something they were genuinely excellent at.
"I've never had that happen at a company before," she said.
The exercise turned into something bigger than an afternoon of presentations. Hearing directly from her peers about what they were proud of, and pulling lessons from how each of them led, pushed the group toward a shared management approach built around genuine leadership and rep support, rather than a narrow focus on numbers and data. It changed how Devin showed up for her own team heading into the back half of the year.
"Everyone is so kind and earnest and ready to support each other that you never feel like you're isolated and alone, even if we're in a fully remote environment."
That's the same culture Devin thinks her new AEs are responding to. Hard work here turns into recognized results instead of quietly disappearing, and getting behind a mission that's genuinely shaping the future of cybersecurity makes staying motivated something that takes almost no effort. It's the reason she tells every new hire the same thing when they join her team.
"The biggest piece of advice that I give them in order to help them succeed is for them to approach everything with curiosity."
A team this new already sounding this settled isn't an accident. It's the same support Devin found from her own peers, passed down to the people she leads. That's the thread running through everything she's done here: notice what's missing, then do something about it.
