How Black Duck turned a major AI security moment into an interactive experience that helped organizations evaluate their readiness.

Company: Black Duck

Focus: Interactive content, application security, campaign strategy, AI-assisted content development

My role: Concept development, project leadership, content creation, and cross-functional collaboration

Collaborators: Product marketing, product engineering, UX and web teams, and executive leadership

The challenge

The launch of Mythos and Anthropic’s Project Glasswing presented Black Duck with an opportunity to help customers and prospects understand a fast-changing application security landscape.

Organizations needed to consider where their security programs stood and what they might need to change to prepare for AI-enabled attacks. Black Duck’s marketing team pivoted a major campaign from the broader theme of “AppSec at the speed of AI” to a more immediate question: How do you prepare for Mythos?

I saw an opportunity to answer that question through an interactive assessment. I had advocated for this kind of content for some time, and the campaign gave us a timely reason to put it into practice.

The idea

I conceived the Mythos Readiness Assessment as a way to turn Black Duck’s security expertise into a useful, personalized experience.

Rather than asking an audience to read about the risks in general, the assessment would invite them to evaluate their own program. In return, they would receive a clearer view of their readiness and a starting point for deciding what to do next.

The concept also supported the campaign’s business objective: give Black Duck a meaningful way to engage customers and prospects around a timely challenge and connect its capabilities to their needs.

From proof of concept to a working assessment

I used AI to develop an initial proof of concept, then revised it and worked with subject matter experts to refine the questions and grade the possible responses.

The assessment’s framework drew on Black Duck’s internal messaging, qualitative expertise, and market intelligence. I used AI alongside those materials to help develop the five assessment dimensions and scoring approach, then collaborated with product marketing managers and engineers to hone the content. Product and solution messaging informed the recommendations.

The five dimensions cover application security testing, supply chain visibility, vulnerability prioritization, AI-powered defense, and program governance. Together, they give participants a way to consider their readiness across the program rather than through a single measure.

Designing for participation and usefulness

A strong assessment needed more than good questions. It needed an experience people would be willing to complete and results they could understand and use.

I worked with our UX lead to reduce the assessment from 15 questions to 10, balancing the depth of the evaluation with the need to keep the experience brief. Our UX lead designed the web experience, including its format and page layout.

Together with the web team, we worked through practical decisions about the participant journey: whether questions could be skipped, what should happen when someone left before finishing, how users would move between questions, and how much of the report to present before requesting contact information.

We also considered how to organize the results: what belonged in the main report and what could live in an appendix for readers who wanted more detail.

Making the results meaningful

The completed assessment translates responses into an overall readiness score and a maturity level, with scores across each of the five dimensions.

The results go beyond a number. They explain what the participant’s maturity level means, describe characteristics associated with that level, and connect the assessment to potential next steps. The report also maps relevant Black Duck capabilities to the participant’s readiness level and offers an opportunity to speak with an expert.

The result is an experience designed to give the audience something useful while creating a natural connection to a more specific conversation with Black Duck.

Bringing the project across the finish line

The assessment came together while the organization was managing a website migration and other competing priorities. I continued to advocate for the project and worked across product marketing, engineering, UX, and web teams to bring it to publication.

Our CMO was an enthusiastic executive sponsor and helped create urgency across the teams involved.

The outcome

Black Duck published an interactive assessment that brought its expertise, campaign message, and product story together in one experience.

The project gave the company a way to engage its audience around a pressing question and give participants a personalized view of their security readiness. It also demonstrated how an idea can move from an AI-assisted proof of concept to a substantive, cross-functional digital experience.

Explore the Mythos Readiness Assessment