HackerOne

Since 2012, HackerOne has reduced cybersecurity threat exposure by providing proactive protection against cyberattacks. HackerOne’s platform blends the security expertise of ethical hackers with asset discovery, continuous assessment, and process enhancement to reduce risk and enable business transformation for more than 1,000 global brands. HackerOne has over 450 employees, with offices in San Francisco and the Netherlands.

Lucidchart is widely adopted across the organization, primarily used among HR and IT teams. We had the chance to interview Allison Jones, the director of people ops at HackerOne, to better understand how the people team and other cross-functional teams have enhanced collaboration, improved documentation, and optimized processes with Lucidchart.

“I've used Lucid mostly for team planning, structure changes, process improvement, and documentation.” —Allison Jones

Allison’s team handles the behind-the-scenes operations throughout the employee life cycle, such as onboarding processes and assisting with employee changes. Her team also focuses on automating and streamlining processes and managing a shared services system that monitors internal cross-functional processes. Allison explains that it is important to provide documentation that answers employee questions quickly, creating a great employee experience, optimizing productivity, ensuring equitable benefits, and keeping processes running smoothly to meet deadlines.

Let’s take a closer look at why HackerOne turned to Lucidchart.

Collaboration

The people ops team uses Lucidchart to collaborate on company-wide strategic goals. Allison works closely with the IT team on things like creating employee accounts in their systems, granting access to technology, and more, making cross-functional collaboration a top priority. These complex timelines and systems are easier to understand with thorough visual documentation, which Allison and her team create with Lucidchart diagrams. As a former Visio^® user, Allison found that Lucidchart was much more capable of supporting these customizable, intuitive collaboration needs to work with IT and other teams.

For example, Allison will create a process flow in Lucidchart and share it with IT or other stakeholder managers so that they can collaborate together. This works effectively because collaboration in Lucidchart can be done as a team in real-time or asynchronously, which is ideal for HackerOne’s global teams. Allison explained that Lucidchart helps everyone get on the same page, regardless of their location. She also described how this type of collaboration works for visual and textual learners because the information is easy to digest and understand.

Documentation and visualization

Before Lucidchart, Allison’s team was using Word to document processes. This made it difficult to collaborate, share ideas, and visualize processes as a whole. The people ops team has now made it a standard operating procedure to require each document to be accompanied by a Lucid visualization. Allison’s hope is that, eventually, the majority of process documentation will live in Lucidchart.

Another key benefit of creating documentation in Lucidchart is the ease of access across the HackerOne organization. Teams use the Lucid Confluence integration to communicate processes internally with technical and non-technical teams to drive transparency within the organization. They also have found value in the Lucid training offerings, which teach internal users how to create polished and effective diagrams and documents.

Process improvement in the digital age

HackerOne is focused on being a digital-first company, meaning they leverage technology to work effectively in a digital environment across global teams. Lucidchart provides a secure, cloud-based environment for teams to do that by planning and mapping processes visually from start to finish. Specifically, Allison’s team relies on a few types of diagrams. Let’s take a closer look:

Org charts

At HackerOne, org charts are primarily used for Radford job leveling, a global leveling approach that aligns job levels with company criteria to make staffing decisions. In Allison’s case, she uses this method to determine which job levels she needs on her team and how she can work better with other teams across the org.

Process flow diagrams

She also uses process flow diagrams to visualize an entire process clearly. Once she has it mapped out, she is then able to identify inefficiencies and opportunities for automation. Some other features that have helped with her process improvements are swimlanes to depict timeframes, shape libraries, and custom colors and styles to communicate differences. 

Free-form thinking and whiteboarding

Finally, Allison uses her agile project planning background to put her thoughts on Lucid’s free-form, infinite canvas rather than a traditional, physical whiteboard. She can add sticky notes and lines to rearrange ideas, make connections, and draw conclusions in a way that suits her visual thinking style and empowers her to make strategic decisions. Allison and her team are also becoming familiar with the Lucidspark app for Zoom, which allows teams to collaborate on a virtual whiteboard together on video calls. 

Lasting impact

Lucid continues to have a lasting impact on HackerOne. Allison mentioned that her team has saved lots of time by switching from viewing processes in PowerPoint to Lucid. Lucidchart allows the team to visualize an entire process from start to finish clearly. Productivity has increased by enabling asynchronous communication, meaning fewer meanings and more time to focus. By having properly documented processes, Allison and her team have been able to work more efficiently and boost productivity.