Scytale
An open-source identity engine, turned into a product enterprises could run — all the way to an HPE acquisition.
Scytale was a Zero-Trust identity startup built on SPIFFE and SPIRE, the open-source CNCF frameworks for giving every workload a verifiable identity. As founding designer I worked across three connected fronts — the research that mapped how people adopt the frameworks, the web experience that was their front door, and the self-service product that turned a command-line engine into something a security team could actually operate.
One foundation, three fronts.
SPIFFE and SPIRE solved a hard, real problem — verifiable identity for workloads across dynamic, hybrid-cloud infrastructure — but they lived on the command line and demanded deep expertise. Scytale’s bet was to make that power usable. The design work split into three pieces that fed each other: understand the adopter, fix the front door, and build the product.
SPIFFE & SPIRE
The open-source Zero-Trust identity frameworks the whole platform was built on.
Adoption research
A repeatable research engine and a mapped journey — where and why people fell off.
Scytale Enterprise
The self-service platform that turned the CLI engine into something teams could run.
From a command line to a product you can operate.
The founding-design work: turning SPIFFE/SPIRE into a self-service Zero-Trust platform — dashboards, node sets, workload identity mapping, event logs — that cut application onboarding from weeks to minutes. Proof-of-concept work, used on a limited basis before the acquisition, then formalized and integrated into HPE’s product lineafterward — which is why the later screens carry HPE’s branding.
The full product story — the POC screens, and the same flows rebuilt in the HPE design system:
See the Enterprise ProductMapping the journey from onlooker to adopter.
The user-journey work, separate from the product design: a repeatable research engine, a nine-step adoption journey in three phases, three proto-personas, and the finding that reset the strategy — the barriers to adoption were almost never technical. This is the research that told the rest of the work where to aim.
The full research story — the engine, the journey map, the personas, and the barriers:
Read the Adoption ResearchRebuilding the open-source front door.
Where the research cashed out first: the SPIFFE.io / SPIRE web experience — the literal front door where new visitors were bouncing. A real hero, audience-split navigation, SPIRE given its own stage, and community treated as an entry point. A/B-validated to move bounce down 7% and conversions up 12%.
The full redesign story — the before/after and the numbers it moved:
See the SPIFFE WebsiteProof of concept, then acquired and formalized into HPE.
The product design was high-level proof-of-concept work, in use on a limited basis — enough to prove that the open-source engine could become a real, operable Zero-Trust platform.
HPE acquired Scytale, and the UI was formalized and integrated into HPE’s product offerings — rebuilt in the HPE design system. That’s the HPE branding you see on the later product screens.
A designer’s job here wasn’t one screen — it was making an expert-only open-source technology legible and adoptable, from the research that understood the user to the product that served them.
From an open-source engine to an acquired enterprise product.
Three connected pieces of one project — pick a way in: the product, the research, or the website.