Iterating towards PMF
Simplified designs for product, marketing, and sales enablement, while iterating towards product-market fit at Smallstep.
- Client
- Smallstep
- Role
- UX Consultant
- Status
- Shipped
- Year
- 2023 – 2026
01
The challenge
Smallstep was already loved by serious cybersecurity engineers. They had built the infrastructure, automations, and workflows to securely create and operate a private certificate authority, and they had massive support from the open source community. Those successes hadn't yet translated into the deal sizes and product vision they knew they could achieve. They needed UX partners to help them see their existing product with fresh eyes, up-level design, and iterate faster towards additional customer value.
02
Scope
Over three years, our design team helped Smallstep find product-market fit. To get there, we spoke to users and potential customers, launched a design system, overhauled the product a few times, refreshed the brand, marketing messages and website, helped them stand out at tradeshows, and delivered numerous incremental product improvements. Average contract size grew by 4x, and ARR grew by 3x.
03
Jobs to be done
I mapped the jobs people were hiring Smallstep to do against the pain points blocking them. Each row tied a use case to a real cost, a persona, and the value at stake. This became the scaffolding for every prioritization call that followed.
04
Design system intro
A product searching for fit changes constantly, and the old UI broke every time it did. I introduced a design system so the team could ship new surfaces fast and keep them coherent. Consistency stopped being a cleanup task and became the default.
05
Website refresh
The marketing site needed to match the product's new clarity, and feature the UI front and center, with plain language, and social proof. The sales team reported that intro calls with new leads were starting from a new point of clarity, where people begin asking about specific feature capabilities.
06
Product marketectures
Some of the hardest design work was explaining what the platform actually did. I built product architecture diagrams, like this Enterprise Relay view, to make a technical system legible to a non-technical buyer. Marketing and sales used them to sell the why before the how.
07
Tradeshows
Design and branding had to hold up off screen, too. I oversaw booth design for tradeshows. These events were also a great opportunity for UX research, helping us gauge how the industry's understanding of "device identity" was evolving.
08
Website refresh, round two
As the company's understanding of its market sharpened, so did the story. The second refresh staked a bolder claim, the world's first Device Identity Platform, and led with the Fortune 100 trust behind it.
