Twelve Products to One Platform

Cisco’s Security Business Group had a portfolio problem. Over the years, through acquisitions and siloed internal product initiatives, their “portfolio” had become a collection of 12 disparate tools that didn’t work together. Duo for multi-factor authentication. Umbrella for DNS-layer protection. Secure Endpoint for malware detection. SecureX for threat response and orchestration. Etc etc etc. Each product served a different use case in the fragmented security ecosystem, and at least on paper, they all rolled together into a product suite that addressed an organization’s primary security needs through a single vendor.

But in reality, each one was a completely separate world. Different UIs. Different navigation models. Different mental models for what a “user” or a “device” or a “network” even was. An IT admin securing a mid-sized organization wasn’t managing a security posture — they were context-switching between a dozen tabs, re-defining the same entities from scratch in each one, and creating their own duct-taped workflows, even between tools made by the same company.

DesignMap was brought in to design a UX vision for what it would look like if these products were one platform.

Yes, ostensibly, we were there to architect a portfolio, but between the lines there was a messier, and more human problem to solve: How to defuse the political tensions that arise when teams are forced to come together.

Each product team had spent years building its own identity, priorities, and roadmap. And now they were being asked to align around a shared platform, consolidate overlapping capabilities, and, in some cases, hand off functionality they’d built themselves. That required more than design work—it required collective thinking instead of the tribal instincts that were currently at play.

I think DesignMap was brought in partly because we could act as neutral facilitators. We weren’t tied to any one product, which let us ask difficult questions, surface tensions, and create the shared frameworks and language the teams needed to work together.

This is the kind of work I enjoy most. I’m comfortable in the messy front end of complex projects—learning the landscape, making sense of competing perspectives, putting words to uncomfortable tensions, and building enough shared understanding for people to move forward together.

The first month was largely about getting smart. We ran product demos with teams from six of the main products — Duo, Umbrella, Secure Email, SecureX, Secure Endpoint, and the Frontizo/Meraki network security stack.

Each demo told a version of the same story: capable product, proud team, growing complexity. Duo was a particularly interesting case — originally built for multi-factor authentication, it had accumulated features over the years at customer request until it had grown into what the team themselves called an “amoeba.” More or less the same story played out across the portfolio.

Alongside the product demos, we ran stakeholder interviews across the organization. The conversations kept surfacing the same tension:

What struck me about these conversations was that nobody needed convincing. The people inside Cisco were already saying all of this. The problem wasn’t awareness — it was that nobody had yet built the organizational will, or the UX vision, to make it real. That’s why we were there.

Once we’d mapped the portfolio and synthesized the stakeholder conversations, we explored several architectural directions for how integration might work. We generated seven distinct options — ranging from lightweight visual bridges between existing products all the way to a fully unified platform — and pressure-tested each one against what we’d heard.

The platform’s information architecture is expressed through the left navigation — three buckets that reflect how the system thinks, not just how it’s organized. Each one carries a design argument.

With the framework established, we moved into designing what the experience would actually look like. Rather than designing a series of disconnected screens, we built the vision around a single user narrative:

An AI-driven recommendation layer detects that Sam’s VPN is at 90% capacity and suggests enabling Secure Remote Access. Rather than generic marketing copy, it shows Sam projected impact data specific to his organization. This is a novel solution to a problem that both relieves strain on the VPN, and increases security of the Bank App asset.

This is the difference between a platform that aggregates data and one that actually uses it. The system already knows Sam’s environment — the scale of his user base, his current VPN load, and which services he has active. Platform Intelligence uses that context to make specific, relevant recommendations rather than generic alerts.

When Sam activates the service, his configurations follow him in, meaning that he gets a huge head start on creating policy in this new service. Activating a new security service shouldn’t feel like a migration project. When services work together, setup can be done in a snap.

More coming soon…