The Company

Rapid7 is a global cybersecurity leader, providing software and managed services that give businesses full visibility and detection across their attack surface. Our multinational workforce, spanning major offices in Belfast, Boston, Dublin, Prague, Reading, Pune, and Arlington, along with numerous remote colleagues, ensures we can support a worldwide customer base.

Culture is central to Rapid7, driven by core values integrated into every aspect of our work. We also champion diversity and inclusion through various impact groups that empower under-represented communities in cybersecurity and actively engage in community events.

My Role

As a UX Design Intern within Rapid7's Belfast Placement program, I had the opportunity to immerse myself in a global company with diverse business units. This meant collaborating closely with cross-functional teams, including engineering, product management, IT, and Information Security.

My journey began with the Analyst Workflow team, where I spent the initial months contributing to a fast-paced UX enhancements project. This quickly transitioned into working on larger initiatives with multi-disciplinary teams, specifically focusing on enhancing Rapid7's Detection & Response capabilities.

Following a significant UX team reorganisation after Christmas, I joined the Detection & Response Team. In this role, I remained dedicated to improving Rapid7's ability to help customers understand and address active threats in their environments. I also contributed to projects for the managed services team, directly boosting their capacity to support customers effectively.

The role of a UX Designer at Rapid7 is multifaceted, demanding a broad range of skills. My foundation in Interaction Design from my first two years at university provided essential know-how across UX best practices, customer journey mapping, competitive analysis, visual design, and design tools.

Beyond this grounding, I significantly expanded my toolkit on the job, thanks to the support of my colleagues. This practical experience included gathering customer behaviour metrics, leveraging the Rapid7 Design System, collaborating cross-functionally within the broader product organisation, and refining my presentation style to meet specific business needs

Developing Skills

My placement was a period of constant learning and skill refinement. I was exposed to and deepened my knowledge of various enterprise software applications, such as Slack, Jira, Confluence, Miro, Dovetail, and the Google Suite. Using these tools in a fast-paced environment has illuminated how they can enhance my design process and collaboration skills.

Beyond software, working at Rapid7 has allowed me to learn how to work using the Agile process based on a 2-week sprint cycle. This is a common working style across the software industry. However, this was totally new to me and took a lot of getting used to, especially as it was only being implemented within the UX team at the same time. I found it tough at first, as it requires a lot of pre-planning, and being at the early stages of my career, I didn't feel I had the experience to accurately estimate how long tasks would take. As I got more used to the process, and with support from the senior team members, I got a lot better at this and was really able to see the benefits of working using the Agile process.

One of the most exciting developments during my time on placement has been the growth in understanding of how AI can fit into the design process. As a designer, this is another tool to get to grips with. I have been fortunate to have had access to enterprise GPT software. Rapid7 has licences for both Google Gemini and ChatGPT, allowing me to experiment and develop my own processes for utilising AI. For me, content design and writing in-product copy is something I find challenging. By utilising AI, I can refine my first draft copy into much more realistic content for my mocks. This allows me to hand off much more polished copy to the writing team, reducing their workload and leading to better results.

Actively seeking and incorporating feedback was a key part of my development as a designer during my placement. My role at Rapid7 provided regular opportunities to receive insights from a wide array of project stakeholders, including management, engineering, Customer Success, and product managers. Rapid7's culture, with its emphasis on constructive and kind feedback, empowered me to not only refine my design work but also to understand and address the needs of my stakeholders. I've always believed feedback is crucial to refine designs. My placement broadened the scope of individuals I could seek input from, further solidifying this belief. Seeking feedback on all my designs will remain a core part of my work beyond my placement.

Challenges

My placement year has been full of challenges, each of which I tackled and found solutions for. A significant challenge I encountered was collaborating effectively with diverse business units and aligning on project goals. Understanding each team's definition of success required regular, open communication, which proved difficult with only 30-minute weekly meetings. This was especially challenging initially, as the team was based in America. I had to quickly adapt to subtle differences in working culture compared to Belfast and integrate into an already well-established team. I also identified a lack of a defined process for documenting decisions made in meetings, which often led to confusion and delays. To address this, I proactively started providing meeting recaps in the team's Slack channel. This has improved accountability across the team and prevented further issues.

Achievements

Reflecting on my placement, I recognise a number of accomplishments, broadly divided into two key areas. The first area relates to direct projects within the Rapid7 product offering that I was able to design and work alongside engineering colleagues to deliver to customers. These included User Attribution Transparency and Cloud Identity Providers, which both increase the ability to track potentially malicious behaviour back to individual users. The second area of achievements relates to meeting my own personal goals for the year; these have nothing to do with company objectives, but were things I wanted to achieve personally on placement. These include learning more about how UX fits in the wider product development cycle, adapting to a corporate working environment and becoming a valued member of the design team.

Professional & Personal Development

When I look back at my time with Rapid7, I can see huge growth in myself as a professional UX designer and as a person. While I have worked full-time previously, that was within a very different role in an industry that bears little resemblance to the technology industry. This has required me to reset a lot of the professional skills I had acquired in previous roles and relearn how to be successful at a large multinational corporation such as Rapid7. Being part of such a huge enterprise has been a big change for me, and learning how to navigate scheduling meetings across time zones has been a challenge I have adapted to over the course of the year.

While I consider myself to be an organised person, remembering to make all of my files accessible and even more so understandable to a wide range of people, is something I have had to work on all year. Having worked very much as a solo designer on my university projects, my artefacts always made sense to me, but adapting to a world where they needed to be usable by a team of developers was a new challenge. I needed to annotate all my designs thoroughly, and considering technical constraints and delivery timelines was not something that came naturally at first. Speaking with my engineering team about how best to work effectively with them was the best way for me to develop these skills, and I feel I have come on leaps and bounds in this area from the start of my placement.

For me, I find it harder to define personal development from my placement, as I have also been growing outside of work, challenging myself to go on new adventures. I do find that my increased professional confidence has trickled into all areas of my life. Needing to communicate at work with people of different backgrounds and cultures has made me feel more capable of travelling alone and socialising on those trips. I have also noticed that I am more comfortable with being uncomfortable, which may sound like an oxymoron, but throughout my placement, I have had to jump into new areas and ramp up very quickly. This has helped me to adapt to changes that have occurred outside of work and take a calm, thoughtful approach rather than getting anxious and feeling that things are getting beyond my control.

Conclusion

My time with Rapid7 has been a great experience, and while it hasn't always met my expectations. The learning and mentorship I have been able to avail of have been amazing. The whole UX team and all the cross-functional partners have been generous with both their time and knowledge to support me to be the best I can be. I know I have mentioned it throughout this report, but my major takeaway is the confidence I have been able to build throughout my placement both professionally and personally, have set me up to succeed both in final year and beyond as I embark on my career journey within UX. I will remember my time and all that I have learnt from my time with Rapid7 throughout my career and I hope to work alongside a number of this fantastic UX team in the future.