Project Overview
B2B cybersecurity procurement is notoriously complex. Unlike consumer purchases, it involves long cycles, group decision-making, deep technical evaluation, and strict compliance with industry regulations. Security leaders, IT teams, procurement officers, and compliance managers all play a role, often with different priorities and limited alignment. This creates a messy, fragmented buying experience that slows down progress and introduces risk.
Cyberse set out to change that: to build an AI-powered marketplace that simplifies and accelerates the way businesses discover, compare, and purchase cybersecurity solutions.
The Challenge: Designing for High-Stakes Complexity
Cybersecurity procurement is not a linear purchase; it is a high-stakes evaluation involving multiple stakeholders, from CISOs and IT leads to compliance and procurement officers.
Through research and stakeholder interviews, I identified four critical pain points:
- Uncertainty: Buyers struggle to verify if they are choosing the right solution for their specific technical environment.
- Fragmentation: Evaluation processes are often scattered across emails, spreadsheets, and different departments.
- Lack of Trust: Vague or biased product information from vendors makes objective comparison difficult.
- Shared Friction: The need for consensus among multiple stakeholders slows down progress significantly.
The design challenge was to bring structure to these scattered ideas—product listings, AI recommendations, and vendor scoring—into a single, coherent, and intuitive user journey.
User Interview
Although Cyberse’s founding team brought strong cybersecurity expertise, we intentionally began with a clean slate: grounding the product vision in real-world user needs, not assumptions. We conducted interviews with over 10 stakeholders across industries, including CISOs, cybersecurity consultants, department leads, and internal influencers.
“I am responsible for the cyber security of the entire company, so I must ensure there is parity risks to the business.”
— Maria | CISO
Despite their differences, a few shared pain points surfaced across company sizes and security maturity levels:
- 1.Uncertainty: Buyers struggle to know if they're choosing the right solutions for their specific needs.
- 2.Fragmentation: The procurement process is long, confusing, and spread across multiple teams.
- 3.Lack of Trust: Product information is often vague or biased, making it hard to evaluate vendors objectively.
- 4.Shared Decision-making: Multiple stakeholders add complexity and slow down the process significantly.
These qualitative insights formed the bedrock of our understanding, enabling us to move forward with user-centered personas and journey maps that accurately reflected the real-world challenges faced by cybersecurity professionals.
Persona and Buyer Journey
Our in-depth user interviews unveiled a critical insight: B2B cybersecurity procurement is a complex, non-linear process driven by diverse stakeholders across various departments. To bring clarity to this intricate dance, we strategically categorized all key players into two pivotal archetypes: Decision Makers and Influencers. This focused approach streamlined our initial design efforts, allowing us to acknowledge the multi-layered reality of enterprise purchasing. I designed a “level chart”, ready for future granular understanding of organizational influence, budget control, and cybersecurity expertise as Cyberse evolves.
Decision Makers
Decision Makers own the final approval and budget. Their focus is high-level risk management, regulatory compliance, and strategic alignment with company-wide objectives.
Influencers
Influencers meticulously research specific needs, evaluate tools, and often initiate the buying process. They are responsible for justifying recommendations and bridging business needs with technical fit.
Persona level-chart: Categorizing stakeholders into Decision Makers and Influencers to understand organizational influence and budget control.
Building on these foundational personas, we meticulously mapped out the buyer journey. This visualization illuminated how each distinct archetype navigates the labyrinthine cybersecurity procurement process, from initial security gap identification to final solution implementation. It highlighted their specific touch points, decision criteria, and emotional states, crucially revealing strategic opportunities for AI intervention and streamlining at every critical stage.
Non-linear Journey - Cyberbuyer: Mapping emotional states and decision criteria for each archetype throughout the procurement labyrinth.
Workflow
Translating our research insights into actionable design, this comprehensive workflow serves as the visual backbone of our thinking, meticulously orchestrating the envisioned buyer journey and externalizing complex mental models into a clear, navigable pathway. It guides users through intelligent touch points from initial awareness to seamless purchase and valuable feedback, with integrated mockups visualizing this optimized experience.
Workflow: Orchestrating the buyer journey from initial awareness to feedback through integrated mockups.
Prototyping
With a clear path illuminated by our comprehensive research and strategic flow mapping, we swiftly transitioned into an intensive design sprint. This concentrated effort allowed us to rapidly conceptualize and build our first prototype version, quickly iterating to refine it into a more robust Version 2. These early prototypes were crucial, serving as the tangible visualization of our collective insights and the foundational steps towards a truly streamlined, intelligent cybersecurity procurement experience.
V2 Prototype: Iterating from collective insights towards an intelligent procurement experience.
Impact and Learning
This project laid the foundation for Cyberse’s product direction. What began as scattered ideas across stakeholders transformed into a unified journey, clear personas, and an interactive prototype that aligned the team around a shared product vision. This foundational blueprint, derived from deep user understanding and robust conceptual mapping, provided our development teams with a precise roadmap, enabling accelerated and highly focused product development. By visualizing how buyers navigate the complex cybersecurity procurement process, we turned ambiguity into structure, setting a clear path for both product development and strategic alignment.
One key takeaway: in domains as complex as cybersecurity, clarity doesn’t emerge by chance. It must be designed.
The procurement process is shaped by risk, regulation, and cross-functional influence. Through thorough research, cultivating an empathetic understanding of diverse users, and meticulously crafting clear thinking maps (such as personas and user journeys), we proved these are not just useful, but indispensable tools. This approach not only shaped our solution but reinforced how UX can lead product strategy in high-stakes, high-complexity environments. This approach not only shaped our solution but reinforced how UX can lead product strategy in high-stakes, high-complexity environments.
