Scaling Identity Protection from Product to Platform
Category
Product Strategy
/
Led the evolution of consumer identity-protection experiences across product growth, acquisitions, partner needs, and platform consolidation — connecting customer needs to business outcomes.
Eighteen Years in One Product Category
I first worked at EZShield in 2008. It was a small company with one product: check fraud protection. The concept was simple. If your checkbook was stolen, we helped deal with the fallout. The market was narrow, but the direction the company was heading was not.
EZShield made a deliberate shift into comprehensive identity protection over the next several years, adding credit monitoring, dark web surveillance, identity restoration, and breach alerting as the threat landscape evolved. The company I’d originally joined to work on check fraud was becoming something genuinely different, with a much larger and more complex surface area.
The Problem Was Never Simple
Identity protection is a hard product problem. There’s no single core job. The platform had to monitor dozens of data types simultaneously, surface alerts that were useful without being paralyzing, support partner financial institutions with their own brands and compliance requirements, and deliver reliable guidance when people were scared. That’s a lot to hold at once.
Major data breaches reshaped consumer expectations periodically. The Equifax breach exposed over 140 million Americans, and identity protection went from a niche product to something most people felt they needed. Each event like that brought new product demands, new partner requirements, and new pressure on a platform that still had to keep working for the people already using it.
Everything, For Years
For much of my first decade, I was the only designer. That meant owning every surface: enrollment flows, the alert system, the member dashboard, account management, the mobile apps. The work was product-level, iterating on features, solving activation problems, making complicated identity monitoring feel manageable for a consumer who didn’t ask to need it.
As the team grew, the nature of the work shifted. Individual features started to matter less than the system behind them: the patterns, the constraints, the shared rules that let a growing team ship consistently without breaking what already existed. That’s where I spent more and more of my time.
EZShield Becomes Sontiq
In 2019, EZShield merged with IdentityForce, one of the best-known consumer identity protection brands in the country, to form a new company called Sontiq. The merger brought complementary products and a larger customer base, along with immediate design challenges: two products with different visual languages, different information architectures, different assumptions about alert behavior. I worked through those integration decisions with product and engineering leadership, making sure that consolidation produced a better experience rather than just a combined one.
Sontiq then acquired CyberScout in early 2021, bringing deep expertise in cyber insurance and breach response. Each acquisition added customer types, partner requirements, and product complexity. Design decisions at that scale weren’t screen-level questions. They were about how a choice in one product would ripple through every other product, every partner configuration, every downstream team.
The B2B Side
Most of Sontiq’s customers came through financial institutions, insurance companies, and employee benefit programs that white-labeled our products under their own brands. Every design decision had to hold up in that context: partner-specific compliance requirements, different brand systems, different content restrictions on what we could say and how.
I led product demonstrations for some of the largest financial institutions in the country, and for companies like Aflac and Google. Those conversations required more than screen explanations. You had to understand how the product fit into a partner’s ecosystem and communicate it to people who’d never seen it before and weren’t inclined to be patient.
Ten Months Before the Exit
In February 2021, Sontiq launched a new cloud-based identity security platform. It unified the product suite onto modern architecture, added machine learning-powered monitoring, improved alert delivery, required two-factor authentication by default, and delivered a significantly cleaner experience than the legacy systems had managed. I led the design.
TransUnion acquired Sontiq for $638 million in December 2021.
A product that’s architecturally sound and ready to scale is a different acquisition target than one that needs to be rebuilt before it can be extended. The platform we shipped was concrete evidence of what the business was capable of delivering, and that evidence had a dollar value.
What Comes From Staying
When the acquisition closed, I’d been at the company, across two stints, for most of the decade. I was the most senior designer and one of the longest-tenured employees across any discipline. What that produced, beyond the product work itself, was institutional knowledge that didn’t exist anywhere else: why specific decisions were made, where the edge cases lived, what the partners had asked for and what we’d declined and why.
