Intuitive Pentest Planning Case Study
Pentest planning and scoping at Cobalt lived entirely in spreadsheets, managed by hand by the customer success team. Depending on the customer segment, it took anywhere from 17 to 29 days just to plan a single engagement — an average of 22.5 days before a pentest could even begin.
Customers Segments
Number of Days to Plan
Growth
29
Small Business
27
Corporate & Enterprise
17
Average
22.5
Lead Product Designer on a team of seven, working closely with Cobalt's Customer Experience team to turn a manual, spreadsheet-driven workflow into a self-service product.
Objective: let customers draft, refine, and collaborate on a pentest until it's ready for review — without waiting on Cobalt staff.
Every new pentest request needed manual review by Cobalt staff before it could move forward — a bottleneck at the very start. I introduced a Draft state: customers build out requirements and see credit estimates on their own, and staff step in only once the document is ready.
Cobalt began as a bug bounty platform built for pentesters, not planners — customers saw findings after the fact, while planning itself lived in spreadsheets and email, entirely outside the product. Today, a master-detail Pentest hub puts engagement status, credits, and findings front and center, with Brief, Collaborators, Coverage, and Reports one click away, guided by a step-by-step wizard for first-time users.
I validated the direction with clickable prototypes of both the pentest hub and the wizard, then tested them with real Cobalt customers before engineering picked up the build.
The new self-serve flow cut planning time across every segment — down 22% on average, from 22.5 to 17 days (see chart).
Smoother onboarding. Faster, more consistent pentest prep. Customer success team freed up for higher-value work.
22% faster planning
Average pentest planning time, across all customer segments