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Professional Experience: Detailed
Technical Sales Specialist/Inside Sales Engineer (SE)
2008 - March 2014 - IBM (formerly ISS) - Atlanta, GA
Led multi-million dollar RFP responses across IBM's full security product and service portfolio, and served as a technical resource to Sales, including on client calls.
Scoped end-to-end product and security solutions from clients' network diagrams or descriptions, and designed enterprise network security solutions for clients ranging from small businesses to large multi-location enterprises. Delivered live demonstrations of the proposed solutions.
Managed Identity and Access Manager sizings: Developed a new document model, educated sellers and customers on the results, and created and maintained extensive documentation of the entire sizing process, where none existed.
Served as team SME for third-party DLP products (Digital Guardian software, Fidelis appliances), IBM Virtual Server Protection (VSP), the IBM Proventia MX UTM appliance and VPN offerings, and the Proventia XGS series of IPS appliances.
Authored white papers on commonly misunderstood topics, including the proper use and scenarios for fail-over bypass units in High-Availability (HA) environments, and how to match a bypass unit and network adapters to the correct appliance.
QA Engineer
April 1996 - 2008 - Internet Security Systems/IBM - Atlanta, GA
Pioneered the concept of a "stealth mode" for IDS/IPS (Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems), now the worldwide industry standard.
As team SME, tested new product features including the RIP, OSPF, and STP routing protocols, QoS, VoIP proxy, the Policy Editor UI, NAT, and reverse NAT.
Instituted full formal test plans across entire products, and created and managed test cases, based on Product Requirements Documents (PRDs), Engineering Responses, and other sources. Worked closely with the technical documentation and development teams, making my areas the most thoroughly tested and best-documented in the product.
Maintained the QA test lab (routing protocols, proxies, and the MX and GX security appliances), and built tools and procedures to reconfigure it quickly and automatically to simulate internal and external networks for each routing and proxy test.
Professional Experience: Other
Fall 2017 - Georgia Tech - Guest Lecturer, UX Research and Persona Development
2014 - 2017 - Validentity, LLC - Co-Founder and VP, Product and Strategy
2004 - 2021 - The Lighthouse School - Board Member
Education
Fall 1992 - Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA - Post-Baccalaureate studies in Music Industry
1992 - Emory University (Goizueta Business School), Atlanta, GA - B.B.A. Business
1989 - Musicians Institute, Hollywood, CA - 1 Year Professional Program
1988 - Oxford College of Emory University, Oxford, GA - Associate of Arts
Additional Technical Skills and Interests
Tools: Figma; Miro; Wireshark; Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, XD); Axure RP Pro; Omnigraffle; Sketch; Balsamiq; InVision; print publishing prep; Office;
Jira/Confluence; Slack; Teams; ChatGPT; Google Gemini; Midjourney; Claude.
Specialties: User Experience and Product Strategy; Personas; Building dashboards and workflows; Security-first UX design; Information Architecture; Lean methodologies (Dual Track Agile); Complex routing environment configuration; Security product configuration (Network and Host-based IPS and UTM appliances and software, security forensic software).
Interests: Artificial Intelligence (AI); I have been a musician for over 30 years, released CDs, and have an interest in learning composition for film. I am an insatiable learner and polymath and maintain yearly subscriptions to LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, Interactive Design Foundation, The Great Courses, Curiosity Stream, TrueFire, and JamPlay. . I am currently writing a book on the neuroscience of learning and memory, particularly on how it relates to musicians, and what strategies can be used to optimize learning and skill acquisition.
ALEX FILACCHIONE
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Professional Experience: Detailed
Principal UX Strategist, Product Designer, Product Owner, Product Manager, SCRUM Master, Doc Writer
January 2019 - October 2021 - Waratek, Inc. - Woodstock, GA/Dublin, Ireland (remote)
Reporting directly to the CEO and CTO, I owned the end-to-end vision for the Waratek Management Console (MC), redesigning its workflows around specific user personas while vastly expanding scalability and ease of use. I also served as Product Manager and Product Owner and ran Scrum for the team, and authoring technical documentation. Console noise dropped by 100%, and during that time the company's customer base more than tripled.
As the Principal UX and Product Designer and Strategist:
Partnered with the CEO, CTO, and VP of Marketing to set product, research, and design strategy that moved the MC into a competitive market position.
Worked with customers, client services, and business partners to understand their goals and challenges in protecting and managing applications, how they used the MC in their environments, and where it helped or hindered them.
Drawing on human-centered design, customer and market feedback, and my own and the team's security expertise, modeled the existing product workflows and reshaped them into logical flows that fit clients' needs, improving scalability and simplicity.
As the Product Manager:
Met with clients, from small shops to Fortune 50 companies, and worked with stakeholders, development teams, and SMEs to build realistic product roadmaps and strategies around their problems.
Prioritized solutions and led estimates with cross-functional teams, then followed through with customers during and after development, "followed the code" at a high level, led product demos, and helped teams pivot when priorities changed.
Led business development for integrations and partnerships with third parties such as Tenable.io and PingID.
As the Product Owner:
Acted as the voice of the user for the development team, coaching developers on how real customer personas use the product and what core problems they're solving. The result was a UI that users understood more intuitively and that better met their needs.
Senior UX Design Lead (contract)
May 2018 - December 2018 - Delta Airlines - Atlanta, GA
As UX project lead for Delta's fueling, deicing, delay, and cancellation projects serving tower dispatchers, I worked across teams to align stakeholder needs, keep designs consistent, and meet dispatcher requirements.
Wrote a guide teaching stakeholders new to RBAC its levels, hierarchies and inheritance models, Separation of Duties, ANSI standards, and security considerations, in the context of Delta's own challenges, including a full-featured RBAC0 administration proof-of-concept prototype with greater visibility, flexibility, and ease of use than their existing systems, making the User, Role, and Permission relationships clear enough for novice administrators.
Led research and design (as the sole UXer) for multiple applications across carriers, including fuel tankering tools that calculate fuel savings and flight database searches. Dispatchers could view flights across multiple factors to find the most cost-effective place to refuel. Seeing these automated calculations for all their flights was a first for the carriers.
Led research and design (as the sole UXer) for predictive decision-support tools for Airport (Station) Managers, covering deicing, cancellations, flight delays, and gate capacity. At a glance, Managers could identify the delay margin of diminishing returns to minimize deicing wait times, see gate capacity problems in advance, and handle routine delays and cancellations within FAA regulations. The tools let them see problems before they occur and presented solutions.
Senior Designer, User Experience - UX Research, Information Architecture, Security Subject Matter Expert
April 2014 - October 2017 - Cisco Systems/Lancope - Alpharetta, GA
As the UX Principal for discovery and user research, I designed the user experience for the Cisco Stealthwatch application and led UX teams through the full Design Thinking life cycle: discovery and empathy, strategy, user research, problem definition, prototype iterations, and release.
Primary accomplishments:
As team Subject Matter Expert on security issues and industry standards and practices, significantly influenced team designs and improved workflows across the product to support customer needs far better than the existing ones.
Received numerous awards within Cisco for policy UI design, persona design, and work across the entire SBG (Benefit Everyone for policy discovery, Connect Everything award for speakers at the Cisco Atomic Summit 2.0, Innovate Everywhere Guru Recognition for personas, Cisco Win Together award).
Dissected the policy system and, based on user research and problem definition, developed multiple approaches, including a forward-looking solution that greatly simplified policy management while making it more powerful. User feedback was extremely enthusiastic.
Designed and developed user personas that Cisco adopted across the entire Security Business Group (SBG).
Led the effort toward Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 compliance across the SBG.
Defined UX guidelines and brand standards for every SBG product, in areas such as jobs management and served as the principal designer for policy UI components across products.
Analyzed research, proposed prioritized solutions, and presented findings and results to product stakeholders.
Led UX teams through the full Design Thinking cycle, from discovery/empthy through iterations, and through to release.
ALEX FILACCHIONE
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Professional Experience: Detailed
Staff UX Design Lead, Platform, Insights, and Endpoint Privilege Management for Unix and Linux
October 2023 - September 2026 - BeyondTrust - Atlanta, GA (remote)
I led design across the BeyondTrust platform, the Insights security analysis product, and authentication method UIs for EPM-L, the Unix and Linux endpoint management system. I used my security background to define concepts and requirements, not just interfaces, and advocated throughout for progressive disclosure, persona-based workflows, and a security-first approach to UX.
Identity Node Graphs (attack path and privilege analysis):
Co-owned product definition and requirements with BeyondTrust's head of security research, and was sole designer.
Designed highly visual node graphs to illustrate full privilege maps for True Privilege, the concept that privilege crosses domains and identity and authorization platforms, so the graphs were not tied to any single platform.
The feature shipped and became a favorite among SEs and customers.
Mentored another designer who took over ongoing research and testing as I moved to other products.
Persona-Based Security Dashboards:
Originated the concept and championed the vision from day one, defining the core principles: Dashboards tell a story, are actionable, use progressive disclosure, and target a single persona.
Prototyped the concept for a company hackathon, where it won the Visionary Award. Product management then built it, and the resulting dashboards were delivered to customers.
Authored a multi-part guide to designing security dashboards, covering persona discovery, data selection, workflow design, choosing visualizations, and avoiding "security theater" (impressive-looking metrics that add noise without conveying real security information). Presented it to developers and SEs, and SEs adopted it as a framework for building their own customer dashboards.
Senior UX Design Lead, Integrated Cloud Security Platform
November 2021 - September 2023 - Rapid7 - Atlanta, GA/Washington, D.C., Boston, MA, Los Angeles, CA (remote)
As the designer with deep security expertise, I led design for the Integrated Cloud Security (ICS) platform's Attack Path Analysis and visualization, Layered Context, and Identity and Access Management (IAM) features across AWS, Azure, and GCP. I also defined feature sets and requirements, staged them across releases with Product Managers, led internal and external user research, and performed extensive competitive analysis.
With little to no requirements for Attack Path Analysis or Layered Context, I studied the problems and used my security background to hypothesize feature sets and end-to-end workflows. I developed the information architecture, designed the complete features, and tested my hypotheses through contextual inquiries and usability testing.
New to cloud IAM, I quickly learned the domain and Rapid7's approach across cloud providers. I designed a new UI with a more logical, easier-to-use workflow, and created a remediation recommendation schema that fits a wide variety of situations without custom responses for each misconfiguration.
Collaborated across teams and with in-house graphic designers to maintain consistency with other Rapid7 products, defining new styles and UI patterns where needed, including promoting visual guidelines for UX designers and PMs to ensure meaningful data was presented to the right user persona.
Developed and promoted security severity categories, designs, color schemes, and UI/UX guidelines that gave Rapid7 platforms and teams a consistent, noise-free experience where users see only what they need, resulting in less onfusion and a more focused and intuitive experience for end users..
Principal UX Strategist, Product Designer, Product Owner, Product Manager, SCRUM Master, Doc Writer
January 2019 - October 2021 - Waratek, Inc. - Woodstock, GA/Dublin, Ireland (remote)
Reporting directly to the CEO and CTO, I spear-headed the end-to-end vision for the Waratek Management Console (MC), redesigning its workflows around specific user personas while vastly expanding scalability and ease of use. I also served as Product Manager, Product Owner, ran SCRUM for the team, and authored technical documentation. Console noise eliminated, and during that time the company's customer base more than tripled.
As the Principal UX and Product Designer and Strategist:
Partnered with the CEO, CTO, and VP of Marketing to set product, research, and design strategy that moved the MC into a competitive market position.
Worked with customers, client services, and business partners to understand their goals and challenges in protecting and managing applications, how they used the MC in their environments, and where it helped or hindered them.
Drawing on human-centered design, customer and market feedback, and my own and the team's security expertise, modeled the existing product workflows and reshaped them into logical flows that fit clients' needs, improving scalability and simplicity.
Created a visual, point and click UI for the company’s YAML-based proprietary scripting language, thereby completely removing the requirement that customers learn yet another scripting language just to use the product.
As the Product Manager:
Met with clients, from small shops to Fortune 50 companies, and worked with stakeholders, development teams, and SMEs to build realistic product roadmaps and strategies around their problems.
Prioritized solutions and led estimates with cross-functional teams, then followed through with customers during and after development, "followed the code" at a high level, led product demos, and helped teams pivot when priorities changed.
Led business development for integrations and partnerships with third parties such as Tenable.io and PingID.
ALEX FILACCHIONE
Professional Experience: Summary
Staff UX Design Lead, Platform, Insights, and EPM-L
October 2023 - September 2026 - BeyondTrust - Atlanta, GA
Led design across the BeyondTrust platform, the Insights security analysis product, and EPM-L (Unix/Linux endpoint management).
Performed competitive analysis, defined the design and sometimes requirements for each feature, collaborated on the design system and data visualizations, and acted as security Subject Matter Expert (SME).
Senior UX Designer, Integrated Cloud Security
November 2021 - Present - Rapid7 - Atlanta, GA/Boston, MA
Lead research and design efforts for multiple features of the Cloud Security Platform such as
Attack Path Analysis, Identity and Access Management, and Layered Context.
Perform competitive analysis, define the design and sometimes requirements for each feature, collaborate on the design system and data visualizations, and act as security Subject Matter Expert (SME).
Principal UX Strategist, Product Designer, Product Manager, Product
Owner, SCRUM Master, Doc Writer, Application Security
January 2019 - October 2021 - Waratek, Inc. - Woodstock, GA/Dublin, Ireland
Owned the end-to-end Management Console vision.
Worked directly with the CEO, CTO, customers, and partners to develop product, research, and
design strategies in order to spearhead the development of a Management Console tailored to the needs of the users.
The company’s customer base more than tripled, and MC adoption skyrocketed.
Senior UX Design Lead/Projects Manager (contract), Flight Systems
May 2018 - December 2018 - Delta Airlines - Atlanta, GA
Led the research and design efforts (solo UXer) for multiple applications across carriers including predictive tools for Delta Station Managers and tower Dispatchers.
Designed and documented proof-of-concept RBAC (Role-Based Access Controls), giving greater visibility and ease of use in the context of Delta’s security issues (systems and data permissions).
Senior Designer, User Experience - UX Research, Information
Architecture, Security Subject Matter Expert, Network Security
April 2014 - October 2017 - Cisco Systems/Lancope - Alpharetta, GA
Team Subject Matter Expert (SME) on security issues and industry standards and practices.
Designed and developed user personas that Cisco adopted for use across the entire Security
Business Group (SBG).
Led the effort toward section 508 and WCAG 2.0 compliance within the entire Cisco Security
Business Group.
As a UX and IA Principal in discovery and user research, I drove many aspects of Cisco’s Stealthwatch application user experience.
Technical Sales Specialist/Inside Sales Engineer (SE), QA Engineer
April 1996 - March 2014 - IBM (formerly ISS) - Atlanta, GA
Please see detailed Professional Experience.
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UX and Product
UX and product strategy
Design Thinking, Lean UX, Systems Thinking, and Red Team Thinking
User research, contextual inquiry, research analysis, and competitive analysis
Problem and workflow discovery and design, Human-Centered Design, and personas
Wireframing and prototyping
Security
Cloud security (Attack Path Analysis, IAM, Layered Context, risk assessment and methodologies, vulnerability management)
Network security (firewalls, DLP, IDS/IPS, Unified Threat Management, WAF, NetFlow forensic analysis)
Security and technology research (C&C infrastructure, evasion techniques, DDoS)
Networking (TCP/IP, OSPF, STP, RIP, QoS, VoIP and VoIP proxies)
Strengths
Conveying complex technical information clearly and accessibly
Deconstructing complex systems and rebuilding them into intuitive flows of data, design, and information
Finding innovative solutions to difficult problems
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Core Competencies
Dedicated to creating first-class user experiences through innovation and customer advocacy, ensuring quality and usability
in the face of complex demands. I am a creative and detail-focused designer and engineer, an empathetic user advocate, and
perceptive researcher with people and product leadership skills and over 27 years of experience in the InfoSec field.
AWARD-WINNING UX AND PRODUCT DESIGNER, STRATEGIST, AND INFORMATION ARCHITECT
ALEX FILACCHIONE
404.966.6496
alexf.rocks@gmail.com
http://alexf.rocks
www.linkedin.com/in/alexf21
Atlanta, GA