Employee Spotlight: Tara Crawshaw, VP of Client Success

This edition features Tara Crawshaw, our Vice President of Client Success. Tara's path has been anything but traditional from her early days as a high-level collegiate athlete and personal trainer to leading customer-facing teams in tech. What ties it all together? A passion for building relationships, solving problems, and helping people succeed.

In our latest Q&A, Tara shares her cybersecurity career journey, what led her to Corellium, and how she’s laying the groundwork for a new kind of customer success team.

 Q: What inspired you to pursue a career in Customer Success, and how did your journey lead you to Corellium?

I'm super passionate about health and wellness. I competed, I loved sports, and I thought, “Well, I’ll make a career out of this.” I studied exercise physiology and worked as a personal trainer in corporate wellness, but I quickly realized I needed more than a desk job or repetitive routine. I loved talking with people and helping them reach their goals. That’s what personal training was really about: building relationships and creating strategies to help people reach their goals.

That realization is what drew me to customer success. This was right around when it was shifting from customer service to something more relational. You're not just answering support tickets. You’re onboarding customers, talking with them, working with them to help them succeed. I got into it at the very beginning, and I just fell in love.

Even when customers are yelling at you, you know they’re passionate. One of my early customers had a million questions. I was getting pinged every hour. It taught me how to onboard someone successfully by adapting to their pace, and meeting them where they’re at. I like building strategies to make sure customers feel successful. That’s what led me into the field—and what keeps me here, especially in a space as technical and high-stakes as Corellium. It’s been an unexpected but rewarding cybersecurity career journey.

 Q: Customer Success is all about building relationships—what’s one memorable customer interaction that made an impact on you?

My first customer ever really shaped how I approach this work. I was finally let go into the wild, and the company I worked for supported mom-and-pop shops—literally one-person operations. My first customer didn’t even know how to turn a computer on.

Being from New York, I want to move fast. But that specific customer taught me to slow down and realize that not everyone thinks the way I do. I had to take it step by step and walk them through everything. It helped me become incredibly empathetic and taught me so much about what it really takes to onboard someone. That experience also helped me build a strong relationship with them—we got to the point where I could ask them anything, and whether I knew the answer or not, I’d figure it out.

Later in my career, I worked under Amber Remm, my first manager in a formal customer success role, and one of the best mentors I’ve ever had. She had so much emotional intelligence and was always focused on helping you grow. No matter what you brought to her, she would find a way to make it positive and find a solution. She showed me that when someone is yelling at you, they just want you to listen. They don’t want you to fix it right away—they want to feel heard. I always knew I wanted to be a manager like her.

 Q: What’s a skill or lesson from outside of work that has helped you in your role?

Right now I’m building the Customer Success organization at Corellium, and honestly, my background as a personal trainer has helped a lot. When you’re a trainer—especially in a private studio—you’re running your own business. Nothing was handed to me. I had to figure out how to grow my client base, convince people I was the right trainer for them, and build that trust from the ground up.

That experience taught me how to put in the work it takes to excel. It wasn’t just training sessions—I had to handle the marketing, the positioning, and the personal branding. That’s been incredibly important in Customer Success, where you're customer-facing all the time. How you present yourself, how people perceive you, and what your name represents—those things matter. That mindset has definitely carried over into how I approach this role.

 Q: How are you building a team at Corellium?

I actually met the entire company on my second day, during a big company-wide event called Connect. That experience was huge. It probably would’ve taken me a year to meet everyone otherwise, but instead, I got immersed right away. I heard all the presentations, saw how people interacted, and got a real sense of the culture we’re building here.

That early exposure gave me a much better understanding of what Corellium is all about—and that’s something I can now pass on to the new team members as they come in. I wasn’t handed a team; we just hired folks last week. So I’m building this from the ground up, and having experienced the culture firsthand will help me express it clearly and authentically to those joining the team as they begin their own cybersecurity career journey.

 Q: How does your role help customers unlock the full potential of Corellium’s platform?

There are so many ways my role supports our customers. First, I focus on creating onboarding processes that help them ramp up quickly and effectively—without getting lost in the technical complexities. Corellium is a powerful platform, and part of my job is making sure customers don't just stop at the basics.

I help them move beyond initial usage to really tap into advanced features like snapshots, network simulations, and automated workflows. I also work closely with customers to understand how Corellium fits into their existing workflows—whether that’s in security research, or app development.

I act as a strategic advisor, guiding them on how to scale their use of the platform. And I gather and advocate for customer feedback, making sure we’re listening and continuously improving the experience.

Q: Why did you join Corellium?

The mission really stood out to me. At a previous company, I saw firsthand how powerful it is to work somewhere that’s truly making a difference. That experience changed how I think about work—I couldn’t see myself going back to just supporting sales or chasing quotas. I wanted to be part of something that mattered.

Corellium felt like one of those rare places where the mission was exciting and meaningful. You have to step outside the box here—it’s not a typical customer success role. It’s more strategic, more challenging, and that’s what drew me in.

And then, as I went through the interview process, I was blown away by the people. Everyone I met had such high emotional intelligence and technical expertise—high EQ and high IQ. It was motivating just to be around them. I left those conversations thinking, “I have to work there.” It felt like the right next step in my cybersecurity career journey.

Q: What are you looking to do in your first 90 days?

In my first 90 days, my goal is to start having a meaningful impact on our customers. I want to see engagement go up, increased adoption of the product, and customers achieving the success they’re aiming for. If we’re doing things right, we’ll be able to track that progress—not just in usage, but in how supported and empowered our customers feel using Corellium. It’s just the beginning of my cybersecurity career journey here—and I’m excited to see where it leads.

Start Your Cybersecurity Career Journey at Corellium

Want to work alongside experts like Tara at Corellium? Check out our open positions at Corellium Careers.