How Customer Feedback Shapes What We Build at Heeler

At Heeler, we believe that the best products are built in collaboration with those who will use them. From day one, our mission has been to create a transformative application security platform, and we knew that achieving this would require more than just innovative ideas and advanced technology. It would require deep, ongoing engagement with the very people who face the challenges we aim to solve: our customers.

When we started working on Heeler more than a year ago, we didn’t just dive into development. We started by engaging with more than 100 security leaders to validate both the problems they were facing and our proposed solution. This initial collaboration laid the foundation for Heeler and ensured that we were addressing real-world challenges from the very beginning. These early research partners also led to our first design partnerships.

The Role of Design Partners in Our Journey

From the earliest stages of Heeler’s development, we have engaged in design partnerships with forward-thinking security leaders that are reinventing their organizations to embrace a broader mandate of trust and security by design. These partnerships have been instrumental in helping us understand the real-world challenges and needs of modern AppSec and development teams.

Our design partners provide us with invaluable insights, feedback, and suggestions that directly influence the features and capabilities of our platform. This collaborative approach ensures that what we build is not only innovative but also highly relevant and effective in addressing the most pressing security challenges.

Building with Precision: The Impact of Feedback

The process of integrating customer feedback into our product development is both structured and dynamic. We engage with our design partners through regular feedback sessions based on product usage, product demos of new capabilities, and deep-dive workshops on conceptual questions. During these interactions, we actively listen to their experiences, challenges, and aspirations.

Here are a few examples of how design partner insights have shaped our platform:

• Friction Free Deployment and Integration: Feedback from partners struggling with complex deployment processes prompted us to focus on seamless integration. We developed Heeler to operate without the need to deploy an agent, make a build modification, or apply tagging, making it easier to deploy and integrate into existing workflows.
• Threat Modeling: Our design partners immediately saw the impact of using Heeler in critical stages of threat modeling and we worked with them to align with the STRIDE and PASTA frameworks. Heeler automates the decomposition of applications, creating comprehensive diagrams, identifying trust boundaries, and mapping assets. By continuously updating and correlating real-world threat intelligence with the attack surface, Heeler streamlines the identification, prioritization, and mitigation of threats. This automation enhances the accuracy and effectiveness of threat modeling, allowing teams to focus on mitigating high-priority risks and maintaining a robust security posture, rather than building and maintaining context.
• Context and Prioritization: Many of our design partners face significant challenges with maintaining visibility into their application’s security posture due to the complexity of their microservices architecture. They needed a solution that could not only track vulnerabilities but also track deployments and provide clear, actionable insights that aligned with their business objectives. Their feedback led us to enhance our unified code, runtime, and business context features, allowing for more precise risk identification and prioritization based on real-world impact.

Iteration and Continuous Improvement

The collaboration with our design partners doesn’t end after the initial feedback. We view product development as an iterative process, where continuous improvement is key. As our partners implement Heeler in their environments, they provide ongoing feedback that helps us refine and enhance the platform.

The Value of Collaboration

The value of working closely with our design partners goes beyond feature development. It’s about building a product that truly meets the needs of those it serves. By grounding our innovation in the real-world experiences of our customers, we ensure that Heeler not only solves today’s security challenges but also evolves to meet the challenges of tomorrow.

This collaborative approach fosters a deeper connection between our team and our customers. We’re not just building a product; we’re building a community of security professionals who are united by a common goal: to create more resilient, secure applications.

Looking Ahead: The Future of Heeler

As we continue to grow and evolve, our commitment to customer collaboration remains at the core of our product development process. We are excited about the future of Heeler and the ongoing partnerships with our design partners. Together, we will continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible in application security, ensuring that our platform remains at the forefront of innovation and effectiveness.

In conclusion, the journey behind the scenes with our design partners has been—and continues to be—an enriching experience. Their feedback is not just a part of our process; it’s the foundation upon which Heeler is built. We look forward to continuing this journey, building a platform that not only meets but exceeds the expectations of the global AppSec community.

Thank you to all our design partners for your trust, insights, and collaboration. We couldn’t do it without you.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Heeler can transform your application security, or if you’d like to explore becoming a design partner, please feel free to reach out. We’re always excited to collaborate with those who share our vision for a safer, more secure digital world.

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