Do you know what a CVE is? And what it can do to your product strategy?

Calm down. Do not close this tab just yet. It is likely that you have never worried much about CVEs. I used to think that way too, as 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 launch.

It was not a theoretical lesson: functionality being pulled at the last minute, stakeholders demanding explanations, the team demotivated. The entire 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 dependency card in Jira. It needs to be at the center of decisions from the very beginning.

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

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

Feature delivery is halted. The lead time, which was already tight, completely blows up. The technical team, who should be focused on building, now has to rush to fix an avoidable risk. Nights start being consumed by emergency fixes, and rework eats up the time and energy that would be used to advance the product. Remember, the industry estimates that fixing a bug 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, and enter 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 higher when the problem is handled in production, but the cost of credibility, team motivation, and strategic alignment. And the customer? They do not follow the internal negotiations or the team's extra efforts. They simply notice the delay in delivery and the unfulfilled promise.

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 issues explode in the middle of a delivery, the 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, but is established in the way decisions are made, in the defined priorities, and in the criteria for considering a delivery complete. If protecting the product is not part of the daily routine, the problem goes beyond code and lies within the established priorities. And product leadership, with its strategic vision 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 sound the alarm at the end is risking delivery from the very start. The product leader, therefore, takes on the role of bringing this discussion to the center while there is still time to do things differently.

How to Start: Abandon the Asterisk, create culture.

Believing that Security boiled down to an asterisk on a planning slide or an isolated dependency in Jira is a reactive, costly, and, above all, strategyless practice. The key to building a reliable product is in integrating security as a pillar right from the ideation phase. The earlier it is considered, the smaller the attack surface, the lower the fixing costs, and the higher 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 leadership involved.

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

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

First Step: Integration of Security into Planning and Design

Ensure that the topic of 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 direct focus to three fronts:

• Security Requirements: What security standards, practices, and controls need to be incorporated from the design stage? To do 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 might open breaches. If possible, perform a collaborative threat modeling before implementation.
  
  

• Security Prioritization in the backlog: Which technical security items already need to be considered? Are security tests contemplated in the CI/CD pipelines? Do they have defined deadlines for execution and remediation? Who is responsible and what is the deadline for fixing vulnerabilities discovered in the pipeline?

In scenarios where there is no formal security team, encourage experienced developers and technical leads to take on this role. Identify and empower Security Champions to bring this vision in at the 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 completed (done) without known risks being identified and handled in a structured way, making this a delivery criterion.

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

• 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 potential abuses and risks right from the requirements definition.

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

Third Step: Beyond Engagement Metrics

As product leaders, our attention must go beyond usage and engagement metrics. The health and security of the product are also reflected in specific indicators that demand constant monitoring and proactive actions. Prioritizing these metrics is investing in building a more robust and reliable product. Actively track:

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

• Security Technical Debt: Establish an acceptable limit for pending vulnerabilities. Example: "Our security backlog must not exceed 8% of the total technical debt." When this limit is reached, removing the risk must be treated as a priority. This needs to be part of the teams' culture, and culture is revealed precisely in difficult decisions, such as choosing to prioritize risk remediation 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 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 fixes, and adjust priorities. Also establish a link with governance teams for audits on change management.

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

Fourth Step: Speak the Language of the Business

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

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

• Impact on the Roadmap: Show how proactive Security avoids interruptions and allows the team to maintain focus on promised deliveries. Example: An untreated critical vulnerability in the base image blocked the build pipeline on the last day of the sprint. The fix 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 the perception of the product 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 into terms of business impact, the more strategic your conversation with stakeholders will be and the greater the chance of securing prioritization and budget.

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 start is one of the most effective strategies to protect the product and maintain the consistency of deliveries.

This work is not visible in the release notes. It does not become a launch headline. But it is what sustains the product's stability in the long term and protects what really matters: the trust of whoever uses it, the business.

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

Want to go deeper? See also:

• The economics of Shift Left

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

• The challenge of vulnerability management (CVEs): insights from Getup customers

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