Calm down. Don't close this tab yet. You probably never cared much about CVEs. I thought the same way, like something distant, the tech lead's responsibility, until I had to deal with the impact of a security flaw in the midst of a quarterly release.

This was not a theoretical learning: functionality being pulled at the last minute, stakeholders demanding explanations, the team demotivated. All the planning, which seemed solid, crumbled in less than a week. If you lead product teams, you need to treat security as part of your strategy and not as a Jira dependency card. It needs to be at the center of the decisions from the start.

The reality: How CVEs can sabotage your product and your reputation

Imagine the sprint routine: planning completed, clear priorities, team focused on execution. Stability seems guaranteed until, at some point during the week, a "dormant" vulnerability in an old dependency comes to light (statistics show that 65% of security failures in production have this origin). The planning transforms into immediate urgency.

The delivery of the functionality is interrupted. The lead time, which was already tight, blows up completely. The technical team, which should have been focused on building, now has to rush to fix an avoidable risk. Nights begin to be consumed by emergency fixes, rework eats up the time and energy that could have been used to advance the product. Remember, the industry estimates that fixing a flaw in production can cost 7 to 100 times more than if it were prevented in the early stages.

Meanwhile, on the other side, leaders try to renegotiate deadlines, explain unforeseen delays, enter into endless lobbies to try to save at least part of the sprint. The cost of the failure grows exponentially; not just the financial, which, according to IBM, can be up to six times greater when the problem is addressed in production, but the cost of credibility, the motivation of the team, strategic alignment. And the customer? They don't follow internal negotiations or the extra efforts of the team. They simply notice the delay in delivery and the unmet promise.

Your role, Your legacy: building the culture that protects the product.

This is where your role as a leader gains even greater significance. After all, when security problems explode during delivery, responsibility is rarely exclusive to the technical team; this occurrence often reflects the absence of an environment that prioritizes risk anticipation. Leading the product, therefore, also implies leading the creation of this environment.

In this sense, culture is not imposed by manuals or training; it is established in the way decisions are made, in the priorities set, and in the criteria for considering a delivery complete. If product protection is not part of the day-to-day, the problem goes beyond the code and lies in the established priorities. And product leadership, with its strategic vision of the market and the team, plays a key role in this context.

Thus, the culture of security and the creation of a stable product are also under your responsibility. Expecting engineering or security teams to alert at the end is risking delivery from the start. The product leader, therefore, takes on the role of bringing this discussion to the center while there is still time to do it differently.

How to Start: Abandon the Asterisk, create culture.

Believing that Security boils down to an asterisk on a planning slide or an isolated dependency in Jira is a reactive, costly, and, above all, unstrategic practice. The key to building a reliable product lies in integrating security as a pillar from ideation. The sooner it is considered, the smaller the attack surface will be, the lower the correction costs, and the greater the confidence in your product.

Organizations with greater maturity in product development have already understood the strategic value of security by design. The benefits range from productivity to protecting the reputation of the business and the involved leadership.

But how can a product leader practically influence this movement?

It's not about executing technical tasks or becoming a security expert, but about acting as a facilitator, bringing visibility to risk, and ensuring that security is also a criterion for prioritization. Below are the steps that you, as a product leader, can and should drive within your teams.

First step: Security Integration in Planning and Design

Ensure that the security theme is considered from the very first moments of product development. This means involving the security team in planning agendas, architecture reviews, and design decisions. At these stages, your leadership should direct the focus towards three fronts:

• Security requirements: What standards, practices, and security controls need to be incorporated from the design? For this, deeply understand the processes suggested by the security team.
  
  
  

• Security implications of the new feature and its architecture: What risks do the new feature and its architecture introduce, and how do they affect the product's attack surface? Consider data flows, external integrations, exposed permissions, and any increase in complexity that may open gaps. If possible, perform collaborative threat modeling before implementation.
  
  
  

• Security prioritization in the backlog: Which technical security items need to be considered? Are security tests included in the CI/CD pipelines? Do they have defined deadlines for execution and correction? Who is responsible, and what is the deadline for correcting vulnerabilities discovered in the pipeline?

In scenarios where there is no formal security team, encourage experienced developers and technical leaders to take on this role. Identify and empower Security Champions to bring this vision at critical creation moments.

Second Step: Redefine "Done" 

Integrating security into planning is essential, but it's not enough. As a product leader, ensure that no task or feature is considered complete (done) without known risks being identified and structured to address them, making this a delivery criterion.

Incorporate security checks into your Definition of Done (DoD), including:

• Absence or mitigation of critical and high vulnerabilities in the images used by the application.

• Proper handling of sensitive data.

• Inclusion of security stories, abuser stories, or evil-user stories in the backlog, anticipating possible abuses and risks from the definition of requirements.

Core principle: validate these items with security experts; do not assume that you and your team know all variables.

Third Step: Beyond Engagement Metrics

As product leaders, our focus should go beyond usage and engagement metrics. The health and security of the product are also reflected in specific indicators that require constant monitoring and proactive actions. Prioritizing these metrics is an investment in building a more robust and reliable product. Actively monitor:

• MTTR (Mean Time to Remediate): Set realistic and ambitious deadlines with technical teams for correcting critical vulnerabilities. Example: "Our MTTR should be under 15 days." Establish a clear action plan to reach this goal.

• Security Technical Debt: Set an acceptable threshold for outstanding vulnerabilities. Example: "Our security backlog should not exceed 8% of total technical debt." Once this limit is reached, removing the risk must be treated as a priority. This should be part of the teams' culture, which reveals itself in tough decisions, like choosing to prioritize risk correction even under pressure for deliveries.

• Establish a feedback loop: After each failure or incident, transform the learnings into concrete action, automating the creation of tasks in the backlog to ensure vulnerabilities are visible and discussed. Just creating the item is not enough, maintain at least bi-weekly reviews between development and security teams to address open risks, validate corrections, and adjust priorities. Also, establish a link with governance teams for audits in change management.

Note: Studies show that maturity in this process reduces 50% of correction time and 22% of incidents in production.

Fourth Step: Speak the Business Language

For Security to receive the necessary attention and investment, it is essential to go beyond technical language. Translate risks like a CVE in terms of business impact; what leadership tracks, such as NPS, delivery deadlines, and acquisition of new users.

• Rework Cost: Explain how ignoring Security early inflates costs and compromises deadlines. Example: Avoiding the vulnerability now, fixing the image used in the pipeline, takes 8 hours of work. If discovered in production, it may require up to 2 sprints of 15 days each, for investigation, correction, validation, and re-delivery.

• Impact on the Roadmap: Show how proactive Security prevents interruptions and allows the team to maintain focus on promised deliveries. Example: A critical vulnerability not addressed in the base image froze the build pipeline on the last day of the sprint. The fix took 15 days to be validated by the security team, which pushed the delivery to the next sprint and delayed the release by 30 days.

• Risk to Customer Trust and Reputation: Detail how incidents can shake the product perception and affect relationships with the client base. Example: Avoiding this vulnerability now requires 5 days of work. If it reaches production and exposes sensitive data, the company may take up to 277 days to regain customer trust (according to market reports).

• Legal and Financial Implications: Present regulatory risks clearly. Example: The LGPD provides fines of up to 2% of the company's annual revenue, limited to R$ 50 million per infraction.

The better you translate security in terms of business impact, the more strategic your conversation with stakeholders will be, and the greater the chances of ensuring prioritization and budget.

Conclusion: Security Starts Before the First Commit

Leading digital products means ensuring that Security is considered before the first line of code. Creating an environment where the team discusses risks, reviews dependencies, and validates vulnerabilities from the start is one of the most effective strategies to protect the product and maintain delivery consistency.

This work is not visible in the release notes. It doesn't make it to launch headlines. But it sustains the product's stability in the long term and protects what really matters: the trust of those who use it, the business.

Integrating security into the team's culture is the responsibility of leadership. And the sooner this conversation happens, the stronger what you are building will be.

Want to dive deeper? See also:

• The Shift Left Economy

• Who would be fired if a CVE in your container was exploited?

• The Challenge of Vulnerability Management (CVEs): Insights from Getup customers

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References

• MITRE Corporation (2023). DevSecOps Best Practices Guide

• NIST (2002). The Economic Impacts of Inadequate Infrastructure for Software Testing

• Kuhn, R. et al. (2020). How do Ordinary Coding Errors Contribute to Security Vulnerabilities?

• Functionize. The Cost of Finding Bugs Later in the SDLC

• Akto.io (2023). Building a DevSecOps Culture