Partner early to shape outcomes
CISOs don’t get leverage by showing up at the finish line. They must ditch the gatekeeper mindset and become true partners from Day Zero. In the past, when security measures were only brought in at the final stage, decision-makers were left with a difficult choice: accept project delays or face unmitigated risks. When product cycles were quarterly and speed did not determine competition, this approach made sense. In today’s reality with AI-driven product development, such a process breaks in an environment now made up of weekly sprints, continuous delivery and vendor-driven dependencies.
When security understands revenue goals, customer promises and regulatory exposure, guidance becomes specific and enabling. Begin by embedding a security liaison with each product squad so there is always a known face to engage in identity, data flows, logging and encryption decisions as they form. We should not want to see engineers opening two-week tickets for a simple question. There should be open “office hours,” chat channels and quick calls so they can get immediate feedback on decisions like API design, encryption requirements and regional data moves.
Bureaucracy must be deprecated in our environment. Show up at sprint planning and early design reviews to ask the questions that matter — authentication paths, least-privilege access, logging coverage and how changes will be monitored in production through SIEM and EDR. When security officers sit at the same table, the conversation changes from “Can we do this?” to “How do we do this securely?” and better outcomes follow from day one.
