This Series:
Part 1 (Intro) | Part 2 (Hire Strange Renegades) | Part 3 (Build Craftsmen) | Part 4 (Create Artisan Products) | Part 5 (Earn Raving Fans) | Part 6 (Forge an Inimitable Brand)
In the Strategy Flywheel at risk3sixty, every stage builds on the one before it. After we Hire Strange Renegades and Build Craftsmen, the next natural outcome is creation.
This is where craftsmanship turns into something tangible - products, platforms, and services that reflect how deeply our team understands the problems our clients face. We call these Artisan Products because they are thoughtfully designed, carefully built, and continuously refined by people who live the work every day.
Great products aren’t accidental. They are the byproduct of culture, trust, and empowered teams.
When we say “artisan,” we’re not talking about novelty or craftsmanship for its own sake. An artisan product starts with a clear purpose: to solve a real problem for our customers.
Every artisan product at risk3sixty begins by deeply understanding the challenges our clients face — the friction in their workflows, the complexity of their environments, and the outcomes they’re ultimately trying to achieve. Only then do our craftsmen design and build solutions that remove obstacles, simplify decisions, and create clarity.
In practice, that means our products are:
Artisan products aren’t created to showcase technical capability. They’re created to make our customers’ jobs easier, their programs stronger, and their organizations more resilient. In that sense, craftsmanship is simply the means - customer impact is the goal.
None of these products exist by accident. They exist because our culture makes room for them. And I credit the culture of innovation largely to our Kevin Ketts (CTO) and Sawyer Miller (VP of Product).
They have helped create a culture that offers our teams the autonomy to question inefficient processes, challenge legacy approaches, and experiment with better ways of working. For example, Sawyer and Kevin encouraged our team to experiment with Agentic AI by offering tools, test environments, and specific client challenges to attempt to solve. Those early experiments quickly led to real AI product offerings and original thought leadership on implementing Agentic AI.
And it's not just a short-term commitment either, leadership supports long-term thinking. We invest time and energy into ideas that may not pay off immediately, but will make a huge impact. We are an evergreen company. That means we have the benefit of thinking about long-term goals over short term profits or exits - if we belive it is the right thing to do for our customers.
That combination - trust, curiosity, and patience - creates fertile ground for innovation.
Many of our most impactful products emerged directly from years of hands-on advisory, engineering, and security work. Here are three examples:
FullCircle is our flagship product. In the early years we used it to deliver our own compliance and risk advisory work, our team saw firsthand how traditional GRC tools slowed teams down instead of enabling them. fullCircle was built by practitioners to reflect how governance, risk, and compliance should work — practical, transparent, and aligned to how organizations actually operate. One of the most common pieces of feedback we get by GRC professionals is that "we can tell it was built by people who have done the job before!" We love that!
"xLM" is our library of "lifecycle management" AI agents. That includes things like "Control Lifecycle Management", "Evidence Lifecycle Management", "Vendor Lifecycle Management" and so on. Our deep GRC expertise, combined with curiosity around applied AI, led to the creation of xLM agents uniquely capable of solving real world problems for GRC professionals. These agents don’t replace expertise - they augment it, helping practitioners work faster, think clearer, and focus on higher-value decisions.
We have done penetration testing for a decade now. But one of the things we realized is that the predominance of successful attacks originate from assets that weren't on the radar of our clients. An open AWS bucket, a public facing entry point, or a password in a GitHub repo. To close that gap we decided to invest in Armada Attack Surface Management (ASM). Built from years of offensive security and exposure management experience, Armada reflects how attackers actually think. The platform emphasizes clarity, prioritization, and operational relevance - helping teams focus on what truly matters instead of drowning in noise.
Each of these products exists because craftsmen close to the work were empowered to turn insight into creation.
Artisan products also applies to great service.
Alongside product development, our teams spend an enormous amount of time honing our delivery processes and customer experience. We scrutinize how work flows from kickoff to completion, how we communicate, how we hand off insights, and how clients experience every interaction with our team. That includes things like beautiful welcome packages, thoughtful kick-off meetings, training and orientation sessions for clients, weekly status reporting cadences, and a lot more.
Customer experience isn’t left to chance. It’s designed, tested, and refined - just like software.
That focus ensures that whether a client engages with our platforms, our services, or both, the experience feels intentional, consistent, and aligned with our standards of craftsmanship.
This is where the Flywheel starts to accelerate.
Craftsmen build better products. Better products create better outcomes. Better outcomes earn trust.
Because our artisan products are built from practice, clients know they aren’t buying theory - they’re adopting tools shaped by people who do this work every day. That credibility compounds over time and sets the stage for the next turn of the Flywheel: Raving Fans.
In the next post in this series, we’ll explore what happens when artisan products and exceptional delivery come together.
When you consistently deliver thoughtful products and outstanding experiences, customers don’t just stay.
They advocate.
Read on to Part 5 "Earn Raving Fans" ---> EARN RAVING FANS