Tenable
We built Tenable's first global design system, evolving from Hive to IRIS, and gave hundreds of designers and engineers one source of truth across its product suite through IPO.
Four phases. One embedded team. One system.
The company that helped define vulnerability management.
Tenable is the cybersecurity company behind Nessus, one of the most widely deployed vulnerability assessment technologies in the world. Building on that foundation, Tenable created Tenable.io, a platform that lets organizations see and secure any digital asset across any computing environment, and went on to help define the category now known as exposure management.
By the time WANDR came on, more than 27,000 organizations relied on Tenable to understand and reduce cyber risk, including over half of the Fortune 500, more than a quarter of the Global 2000, and large government agencies. The company was scaling quickly toward a public offering, and its product portfolio was expanding just as fast across Nessus, Tenable.io, Tenable.sc, and the analytics platform that would launch as Lumin.
Growth was outpacing design consistency.
Tenable had the market position and the engineering firepower. What a fast-growing security platform needed next was a design foundation that could keep every product feeling like one product. Three problems stood in the way.
A fragmented product experience.
Tenable's portfolio had grown quickly across multiple products and teams. The same interface problems had been solved many times over in different ways, leaving inconsistent patterns and components that engineers frequently rebuilt from scratch. There was no shared source of truth to build against.
Extreme data density.
Vulnerability management surfaces enormous volumes of information at once: assets, vulnerabilities, scans, and findings. The interface had to make that density scannable and actionable for security analysts who work inside it all day, without overwhelming them.
Enterprise credibility at a pivotal moment.
Tenable was preparing to go public and to sell deeper into the enterprise. The product needed the polish, consistency, and trust signals that skeptical security buyers and Fortune 500 stakeholders expect before they commit.
Embedded in the team, building the system.
Layer the complexity. Standardize the system.
Layer.
A system of layered planes for visualizations, detail content, and actions, so a dense product could reveal depth without losing the user's place.
Density.
Table and grid patterns engineered for large security datasets, with advanced search, filtering, and saved views built in, so volume stayed scannable.
Consistency.
One documented component set, so every product spoke the same visual and interaction language instead of reinventing it.
In enterprise security, the design system is the product.
Tenable's users are not casual visitors. They are analysts making high-stakes decisions across thousands of assets, often under time pressure. For them, consistency is not cosmetic. It is how they move quickly and trust what they are seeing. That reframed the work. Building the system was less about assembling a component library and more about giving a fast-scaling organization a reliable foundation it could keep building on through its most critical growth phase.
What the work moved.
By the end of the engagement, Tenable had a single documented design system, one source of truth for its product teams, and senior design capacity in place exactly when it was scaling toward a public offering.
In their words.
WANDR has been our design partner through our most critical growth phase, including our public offering. They understand what enterprise product teams need to see.
