I’ve been so busy building, I’m overdue a brain dump of things I’ve been working on. One that I really wanted to share with the cyber security product management community and product managers in general is how to speed up the time to market by rapid prototyping. Build your own MVP before handing anything to development teams or bringing it to roadmap planning discussions. How? Build the product you intend to deliver yourself, test it, play with it, test it against a few friends. Leave it on the shelf a few weeks and come back to it and see if it still feels fresh and has product market fit you thought it had the first time. Then bring it to roadmap planning and developers to build the product of your dreams. The product management team has the potential to move far up the stack in the very near future with the help of Ai. A product manager with a stupid idea with the help of Ai can now be told…go build it yourself and show us what you are thinking. I’m using a non-cyber security related rapid prototype idea for this post, but I also include a handful of other security related rapid prototypes at the end of this article that I’ve created to replicate customer environments, applications to protect against hackers, and wrap new application security ideas around to see if how they actually work.

Here’s how I rapid prototype my ideas:

Step 1: Go get a Firebase account
Step 2: Obviously you pay for premium ChatGPT right?

*Reminder: Don’t be a cheap-ass with your career, these items cost pennies on the dollars compared to your potential. Career development isn’t free, invest in yourself and always have the best tooling.

How my rapid prototyping flow goes: “Free flowing conversation of the idea”
I’m a ski mountaineer and I’m always trying to find mountaineering partners. I have an idea for a ski app that helps climbers find partners, maybe a LinkedIn for Ski Mountaineering is the idea? Lets go over to ChatGPT and talk it out. I tell chatgpt the MVP must have profiles, a small image icon of the climber and some key piecs of their profile. Chatgpt responds with the code to build the site (there’s a lot of back and forth, this isn’t a one shot code thing, so don’t think I’m not actually doing some real coding here, but barely).
Often times ChatGPT wants to build little apps using some applet, so be sure you tell it you want to use firebase and a single page webapp. Then go initialize and launch your firebase app

firebase init
firebase deploy

Climberlink uses some more complex items like firestore and user account stores to keep things simple and all within a single firebase platform for an MVP.

Once your app is deployed, that’s it. You are live. ClimberLink.com

Rapid prototype complete. Let the idea simmer for awhile. Get some feedback and decide later if it’s an idea worth pursuing.

Other rapid prototyping ideas I use are focused on demoing zero trust cyber security products. Need a Wildfire Mapping App to demonstrate how wildfire agencies could map fires? Then wrap your cloud access security broker around the wildfire app to control who can interact with the app in what ways and now you have a real world custom app that state agency might have and it’s your job to protect the app with your new cyber security product. The wildfire app is merely our rapid prototype to mimic customer scenarios and provide real world testing grounds for security products. I do this with many different things, such as timeclocks, ice cream sanitization processing, third party remote access to avalanche beacon firmware updates, coffee cart ordering, self destructing websites, I have so many of these to mimic real world customer scenarios and ideas for product development. With Firebase and Chatgpt creating these MVP’s it has become an invaluable tool in my product management toolbelt and it should become the most important tool in yours as well. Thanks for reading and letting me brain dump!