Building a policy builder for how adminstrators actually think

The Gateway firewall policy builder was one of the most heavily used surfaces in the Zero Trust dashboard, but over time the experience became increasingly difficult to scale. Administrators needed to configure highly conditional policies across DNS, HTTP, and Network traffic, yet the UI separated those workflows into distinct policy types despite sharing the same underlying logic.

As more controls, exceptions, and conditional settings were introduced, the experience gradually evolved into what many internally referred to as a wall of scroll: a vertically stacked workflow with excessive whitespace, limited progressive disclosure, and disconnected relationships between policy conditions and their resulting actions.

Through customer calls, feedbask sessions, and competitive analysis, a recurring pattern emerged. Users generally understood the security outcomes they wanted, but struggled to map those goals to the structure of the interface itself. Administrators were not naturally thinking in terms of traffic categories or sequential configuration flows. They were thinking: If this happens, then do this.

Redesigning such a critical enterprise workflow also carried significant organizational friction. Conversations around improving the policy builder had existed for a long time, but the sheer amount of conditionality made it difficult to communicate a radically different approach through static wireframes alone.

The challenge was not just simplifying the experience. It was creating enough momentum to make a large-scale redesign feel achievable.