Expanding a Security Platform Through Systems Design
How might we leverage existing platform capabilities to support emerging security use cases without building separate point solutions?
Challenge
Signal Sciences needed to grow beyond its core web security offering. We discovered many customers were already “hacking” our platform’s core capabilities to handle bot defense, revealing an opportunity to expand through existing functionality rather than building separate solutions.
Approach
Working closely with my product manager, we interviewed a dozen customers to understand their bot defense needs.
In technical discovery with my tech lead, I leveraged my engineering background to create system visualizations that helped us identify capabilities we could repurpose, leading to better design discussions and alignment across teams.
Solution
Instead of building a separate bot defense product, we created a modular “defense kit” that packaged existing platform capabilities, effectively turning a new product problem into a platform content problem.
- Detection Templates: Our pre-configured detections (“Signals”) identified common bot patterns like web scrapers, vulnerability scanners, and aggressive crawlers.
- Automated Response System: Flexible rules & alerts engine enabled teams to block suspicious traffic, rate limit aggressive bots, and trigger incident response workflows.
- Monitoring Dashboards: Ready-to-use views helped teams track bot activity patterns and measure mitigation effectiveness over time.
Impact & Learnings
The bot defense kit validated our approach to platform expansion:
- Shortened time-to-value for users
- Created clear path to upsell existing customers
- Established blueprint for entering new security markets
- Proved we could compete in new areas without building separate point solutions
Project Details
- Who: Product team pod (designer, product manager, tech lead, 3-4 full stack engineers)
- How Long: ~3 months
- What Tools: Figma for UI design & system diagramming.