It is likely that you have never been very concerned about CVEs.

I used to think so too, like something distant, the responsibility of the tech lead. Until I had to deal with the impact of a security flaw in the middle of a quarterly release.

It was not a theoretical learning experience: functionality being removed 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 decisions, from the outset.

The reality: How CVEs can sabotage your product and reputation

Imagine the sprint routine: final 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 turns into immediate urgency.

The delivery of the functionality is interrupted. The lead time, which was already tight, blows out completely. The technical team, which should have been focused on building, now needs to rush to correct an avoidable risk.

Late nights start being consumed by emergency fixes, the rework consumes the time and energy that would be used to advance the product.

Remember, the industry estimates that fixing a flaw in production can cost between 7 to 100 times more than if it were prevented in the early stages.

Meanwhile, on the other side, leadership tries to renegotiate deadlines, explains unforeseen delays, and enters into endless lobbies to try to save at least part of the sprint.

The cost of failure grows exponentially; not only the financial cost, which, according to IBM, can be up to six times larger when the problem is addressed in production, but also the cost of credibility, team motivation, and strategic alignment.

And the customer? They do not follow the internal negotiations or the extra efforts of the team. They simply notice the delay in delivery and the broken promise.

Read more: AI, SecOps, and Product Security: connecting the origin and effect of risk with a Zero-CVE approach

Your Role, Your Legacy: Building the Culture that Protects the Product.

This is where your role as a leader takes on an even greater meaning.

After all, when security problems explode during delivery, the responsibility is rarely exclusive to the technical team; this occurrence often reflects a lack of an environment that prioritizes risk anticipation.

Leading the product, therefore, also implies leading the creation of that environment.

In this sense, culture is not imposed through manuals or training but is established in the way decisions are made, the priorities set, and the criteria for considering a delivery complete.

If product protection is not part of the daily routine, the problem goes beyond the code and lies in the established priorities.

And product leadership, with its strategic view of the market and the team, plays a fundamental role in this context.

Thus, the culture of security and the creation of a stable product is also your responsibility.

Waiting for engineering or security teams to alert at the end is to risk delivery from the start.

The product leader, therefore, takes on the role of bringing this discussion to the forefront while there is still time to do it differently.

How to Start: Ditch 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 practice, and, above all, lacking strategy.

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 will be, 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 business's reputation and the leadership involved.

But how, in practice, can a product leader influence this movement?

It’s not about executing technical tasks or becoming a security expert, but rather acting as a facilitator, giving visibility to risks, and ensuring that security is also a prioritization criterion.

Below are the steps you, as product leadership, can and should drive in your teams.

First Step: Integrate Security into Planning and Design

Ensure that security is considered from the very first moments of product development. This means involving the security team in planning agendas, architecture reviews, and design decisions.

In these stages, your leadership should focus on three fronts:

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

• Security implications of the new feature and its architecture: What risks does 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 might open vulnerabilities. If possible, conduct a collaborative threat modeling before implementation.
  
  

• Prioritization of security in the backlog: Which technical security items already 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 isn’t a formal security team, encourage experienced developers and technical leaders to take on this role.

Identify and empower Security Champions to bring this vision during critical moments of creation.

Second Step: Redefine "Done" 

Integrating security into planning is essential, but it is not enough. As a product leader, ensure that no task or feature is considered complete (done) without known risks being identified and structured for treatment, 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.

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

Read more: Not All Inheritance Is Good: The Risk of Container Images

Third Step: Beyond Engagement Metrics

As product leaders, our attention 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 investing in building a more robust and reliable product. Actively follow:

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

  
  

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

  
  

• Establish a feedback loop: After each failure or incident, turn the learning into concrete action, automating the creation of tasks in the backlog to ensure that vulnerabilities are visible and discussed. Just creating the item is not enough; maintain 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 Language of Business

For security to receive the attention and investment needed, one must go beyond technical language.

Translate risks such as a CVE in terms of business impact; those that leadership monitors, such as NPS, delivery deadlines, and user acquisition.

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

  
  

• Impact on the Roadmap: Show how proactive security prevents interruptions and allows the team to stay focused on promised deliveries. Example: A critical vulnerability not treated in the base image locked the build pipeline on the last day of the sprint. Correction took 15 days to be validated by the security team, which pushed delivery to the next sprint and delayed the release by 30 days.

  
  

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

  
  

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

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

Read more: Glossary of the Software Supply Chain (Kubernetes, containers, SBOM, CVEs): Quor Edition

Conclusion: Security Starts Before the First Commit

Leading digital products means ensuring that security is thought of before the first line of code.

Creating an environment where the team discusses risks, reviews dependencies, and validates vulnerabilities from the outset is one of the most effective strategies to protect the product and maintain consistency in deliveries.

This work is not visible in the release notes. It does not become a launch headline. But it is what sustains the long-term stability of the product 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 those who lead. And the sooner this conversation happens, the stronger what you are building will be.

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