Traceable

When I joined, the design function was a blank slate. No system, no brand, no process. The question wasn't what to design first. It was what the business needed most to operate credibly in the market.

I sequenced it with a strong design POV, but in collaboration with the CEO and CTO. Initial designs for the core of the product came first. We needed to resolve some foundational issues such as the trace flow, information architecture, and prioritized details.

While brand identity was developed in parallel, it was secondary. We could architect the product and update the visual language of the product later. Therefore, I prioritized understanding our strategic direction and dove deep into the user experience. In addition, I built the entire product and design system to anticipate these shifts, ensuring a seamless and efficient transition.

The website came third, because it was a part of our stealth launch. It was only shared with potential clients internally. The product design work continued to run in parallel as the engineering team matured, and the web and marketing was built to scale content without requiring a bigger team to produce it.

By the time we were closing our Series B and before I left, we had two additional product designers, one agency relationship, and a design system that covered brand, product, and marketing. That output came from three years of deliberate sequencing, creating the business case for more headcount as our product grew.

The cybersecurity industry had a default aesthetic: dark backgrounds, aggressive type, neon accents, visual language borrowed from threat intelligence dashboards and hacker films. It communicated power, but it also communicated sameness. Every competitor looked like a variant of the same company.

We made a deliberate choice to go the other direction. Traceable needed to feel modern, precise, and trustworthy — closer to the design language of a sophisticated data platform than a traditional security vendor. The identity had to work for a CISO sitting in a board meeting and a security engineer evaluating the product on a trial. Those are different contexts with different needs, and the brand had to hold up in both.

I wrote the creative brief, then ran a competitive pitch process with the CEO and CTO to select the right agency. The brief wasn't about aesthetics. It was about the buyer. Who are we talking to, what do they already believe, and what do we need them to feel in the first ten seconds of contact with this brand. The agency selection came down to which team understood that question most clearly, not which one had the best portfolio.

What came out of the process was a visual identity built on clarity and precision. Clean type, a restrained color system, and a mark that worked at every scale from a favicon to a conference backdrop. The design intentionally avoided anything that read as aggressive or theatrical. In a category where fear was the default sales motion, we chose confidence instead.

The website had one job: get a skeptical CISO to book a demo. Everything else was secondary.

Enterprise security buyers don't browse. They arrive with a specific question, evaluate the answer in roughly thirty seconds, and either schedule time with the team or leave. The site needed to answer their question immediately and make the next step obvious. That meant ruthless prioritization of the homepage — what stays above the fold, what gets cut, and what earns a deeper page.

Beyond the homepage, I built a content and marketing system that could scale without adding headcount. Webinars, blog posts, event collateral, and social assets all drew from the same visual system.

Templates were built so that marketing could produce on-brand material without a designer in the loop for every execution. That's what design leverage looks like at a startup: building the system once so the team can run without you.

The site also served a second audience alongside CISOs: investors. As we moved toward the Series B, the website was part of the due diligence picture. A polished, coherent web presence at this stage of a company signals operational maturity. Investors notice when a company looks like it has its act together, even if they don't articulate it that way.

The product had to solve a genuinely hard UX problem: making invisible things visible, fast. APIs don't have a natural visual form. Traffic, risk, and threat data are abstract until something goes wrong, and by then the window to act is already closing. The design challenge was building interfaces that made that data readable at a glance for users who were often responding to incidents under pressure.

I organized the product around three surfaces that mirrored how a security team actually worked. Observe gave teams situational awareness — a continuous view of application and API behavior at whatever altitude they needed, from a single endpoint to the full environment. Protect made the distinction between active threats and handled ones explicit.

That distinction mattered commercially too: showing what the platform had already blocked was how we demonstrated value in renewal conversations. Risk Assessment gave teams control over how risk was scored, with customizable parameters that reflected the reality that a healthcare company and a crypto exchange have fundamentally different threat priorities.

The hardest design problem across all three surfaces was density. Security teams work with high volumes of data and low tolerance for ambiguity. The temptation in a first product is to show everything. The discipline is knowing what to hide until it's needed. We erred toward clarity, surfacing the signal and pushing the noise into secondary views. That call made the product more usable and, in demos, more legible to buyers who only had thirty minutes to evaluate it.