venafi as a service

Watch the football, not the players
The football is the machine. The goal line is machine security. The play is authentication via TLS certificate. Personas are the player.
Like football, plays break down. When that happens, the players don’t just stop playing—they scramble to do whatever it takes to get the football over the line. That’s the Job-To-Be-Done (JTBD). Player positions don’t really matter; only the JTBD does.
Similarly, “security” means a lot of things. TLS certificates are only one play in the playbook. Any number of individuals performing the tasks associated with the JTBD of ensuring machine authentication. Who does what can change by situation (e.g. emergency, company size, team size, etc.). In short, it’s not about the TLS certificate; it’s about the machine.

Personas are tasks we think belong together
A “personas” is really just a verbal shortcut for a set of tasks commonly grouped together into a larger job responsibility. At its heart, this grouping is arbitrary. Different customers will define it differently.
A good software tool is one that anyone can use to get the JTBD.

The machine is the common denominator
The JTBDs that are important for us are determined by a machine’s needs and on the degree to which the tasks toward answering those needs support the machine.
The JTBDs can be categorized into three archetypes:



• 01   Strategic Sets the vision

• 02   Operational Oversees implementation of strategic vision
• 03   Tactical Does the work to get it being done

Of these, it is only the jobs under the tactical archetypes that involve direct access to the machine. All others are enablers or even enablers of those enablers. For us, empowering the tactical group to handle machine authentication themselves—through intuitive, self-evident tools — should be the focus.
The three archetypes are further broken down into more specific jobs—again, to be done by any individual regardless of persona assignment—with ever finer detail about how close or distant its relationship to the machine is. Since individual expertise cannot be counted on, our focus needs to be on usability.

This landing page answers common questions about groups of machine identities as well as providing an onboarding and beyond checklists. The onboarding information is optional but was proved to be critical in transitioning from "white glove" customer on boarding to self service 

Another variation on the landing page with an ability to filter information based on a flexible criteria