In a recent webinar, we discussed with three experienced security professionals, the lessons they had learnt from getting buy-in and rolling out successful threat modeling programs. This blog captures a few of those lessons that you can implement within your own teams, to create threat modeling as a repeatable process within your SDLC practices.
1. Integrate and avoid duplication
To ensure developer acceptance and quality, threat modeling must be a natural part of their development lifecycle. You need to meet them where they are, within the processes they already have and implement daily. Avoid manual, duplicated effort, such as asking teams to fill out Excel sheets and create manual diagrams. Adopting a tool-based approach can improve quality, be easier to scale, and allows teams to benefit from threat modeling alongside existing tool stacks.
2. Shift Left: demonstrate value as an enabler for innovation
Position threat modeling not as a compliance tick box, but as an exercise that adds value by preventing future pain. The goal is to make security an "enabler for innovation". Frame it as a shift left activity: fix the problems now, build the requirements in, and then you can skip the nasty pen test findings later on. No one wants to unravel the whole sweater you just spent a whole year knitting!
3. Embrace a collaborative "do it together" model
Avoid the centralized "security team does all the threat models" approach, which leads to burnout and a lack of expert knowledge. Instead, adopt a collaborative model, or a community of practice. One team adopted the approach: "let's do threat modeling together." They teach a product team member to create the first draft, and the security team reviews it, working as one team and encouraging collaboration.
4. Right-size the effort and do your homework
When rolling out the program, establish a "scoping and right-sizing model" (small, medium, large) to define the expected time and energy investment for development teams. Before engaging development teams, security professionals should do their own homework firs"—reconnaissance on existing firewalls, asset management, and architecture—to avoid wasting the development team's valuable time with questions you could have figured out yourself.
5. Cultivate continuous quality and organizational learning
Treat the rollout as a continuous process to ensure the program's quality and style improve over time. One example was shared where their team uses weekly quality checks, which are essentially mini demos and retrospectives, to discuss threat models, adopt new conventions, and find better ways to represent complex or new technologies (like LLM-based add-ons). This community dialogue forces people to "defend the decisions they've made" and helps the entire organization level up its knowledge.
Need more? Get the guide
No doubt these 5 ways only whet the appetite for your threat modeling journey. No problem, we get it, these security programs can feel heavy when you’re coordinating them for the first time. That’s why we have developed a guide to provide additional advice to create secure software, from the start. Get your free copy here.
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